Frustrated by the limitations of Ethernet, Google has taken the best ideas from InfiniBand and Cray’s “Aries” interconnect and created a new distributed switching architecture called Aquila and a new GNet protocol stack that delivers the kind of consistent and low latency that the search engine giant has been seeking for decades. …
When Nvidia announced a deal to buy Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion in March 2019, everyone spent a lot of time thinking about the synergies between the two companies and how networking was going to become an increasingly important part of the distributed systems that run HPC and AI workloads. …
Within a year or so, with the launch of the “Grace” Arm server CPUs, it will not be heresy for anyone at Nvidia to believe, or to say out loud, that not every workload in the datacenter needs to have GPU acceleration. …
Here we are, on the Friday before the flagship GPU Technology Conference hosted by Nvidia is set to kick off. …
The 3D stacking of chips has been the subject of much speculation and innovation in the past decade, and we will be the first to admit that we have been mostly thinking about this as a way to cram more capacity into a given compute engine while at the same time getting components closer together along the Z axis and not just working in 2D anymore down on the X and Y axes. …
If you thought it took a lot of compute and storage to build Facebook’s social network, you ain’t seen nothing yet. …
There are two types of packaging that represent the future of computing, and both will have validity in certain domains: Wafer scale integration and multichip module packaging. …
It is refreshing to find instances in the IT sector where competing groups with their own agendas work together for the common good and the improvement of systems everywhere. …
If you want to know how and why AMD motors have been chosen for so many of the pre-exascale and exascale HPC and AI systems, despite the dominance of Intel in CPUs and the dominance of Nvidia in GPUs, you need look no further for an answer than the new “Aldebaran” Instinct MI200 GPU accelerator from AMD and its Infinity Fabric 3.0 coherent interconnect that is being also added to selected Epyc CPUs. …
Database acceleration using specialized co-processors is nothing new. Just to give a few examples, data warehouses running on the Netezza platform, owned by IBM for more than a decade now, uses a custom and parallelized PostgreSQL database matched to FPGA acceleration for database and storage routines. …
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