Intel is the undisputed champion when it comes to computing in the datacenter, and it is looking to vanquish IBM’s Power processors from enterprise systems and supercomputer clusters and to keep the handful of ARM server chip upstarts at bay as they try to get in the datacenter door, too. …
There is a disconnect between the database engines that underpin both relational databases and the SQL front ends that have been grafted onto Hadoop analytics tools and the underlying hardware on which these databases run. …
When one thinks about the largest supercomputing sites on the planet and the approach to examining future technologies for next-generation systems, it might seem logical to guess they are at the bleeding edge of exploring entirely new, under-the-radar architectures and approaches that could spike the curve of Moore’s Law. …
Just as the fervor died down around the massive deals for forthcoming pre-exascale supercomputers in the United States following the CORAL procurements (most recently, with the announcement of Aurora—the only one of three such HPC deals that is not betting the future on IBM OpenPower systems) the supercomputing spark was stoked again, this time, from across the pond. …
It has always been our contention that recessions drive successive waves of technology transitions in the datacenter. …
For those who marveled at the $16.7 billion deal Intel made to acquire field programmable gate array maker, Altera, an equal number raised eyebrows at the estimate given by Intel CEO to announce the purchase that one-third of cloud workloads would take advantage of FPGA acceleration by 2020. …
Now that the on-again, off-again deal between Intel, the world’s largest maker of processors, and Altera, one of the dominant makers of field programmable gate arrays, is going to happen for the tidy sum of $16.7 billion in cash, Intel is poised to usher in a new era of computing while at the same time countering the many competitive threats it has in the datacenter. …
For some users in high performance computing and a growing range of deep learning and data-intensive application segments, the shift toward mixed (heterogeneous) architectures is becoming more common. …
IBM has been a pioneer in large scale, hybrid computing and has staked a substantial portion of the future of its Power platform, and the ones that partners are building in conjunction with it through the OpenPower Foundation, on the idea that various kinds of compute, storage, and interconnects will be used to fabricate systems that are precisely tailored to efficiently run specific workloads. …
There has been a noticeable interest uptick in reconfigurable computing devices, most notably, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform