Switch chips have a very long technical and economic lives, considerably longer than that of a Xeon processor used in a server – something on the order of seven or eight years compared to three or four. …
It has been a long time since the dominant architecture in the datacenter has been monolithic systems running siloed applications fed by a three tier network. …
The bi-annual list of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers on the planet is in, and while there might not be any earth-shattering news at the peak of the charts, a drilldown of the results does show some key developing trends in high performance computing. …
IBM did not just stake the future of its Power chip and the systems business on which it depends on the OpenPower Foundation, a consortium now with 160 members after more than two years of cultivation by Big Blue and its key early partners – Google, Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Tyan. …
One of the key themes to improving the performance of clusters running simulations has been the offloading of common routines from the central processors in the servers to accelerators in the network adapter cards that plug into the servers and that interface with switches. …
Here’s a good question to ask: What happens if hyperscale customers who have been pushing their server makers to create density optimized machines move back towards designs that are more monolithic? …
The Power8-based “Barreleye” server being engineered by cloud and hosting provider and OpenStack champion Rackspace Hosting has moved off the drawing boards and into silicon, printed circuit board, and bent metal. …
History moves in spirals, not straight lines, widening our experience and our options, coming around again and again with variations on similar themes. …
The cadence of server processor launches by the remaining companies that still etch their chips has slowed in recent years, starting first with the low-volume players like IBM, Oracle, and Fujitsu and now possibly spreading to Intel with its Xeon line and already baked in with its Xeon Phi line with a roughly three year span between generations. …
When it comes to high performance computing, IBM is in a phase change that will take it several years to complete with its key OpenPower infrastructure partners, Nvidia and Mellanox Technologies. …
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