Last fall, supercomputer maker Cray announced that it was getting back to making high performance cluster interconnects after a six year hiatus, but the company had already been working on its “Rosetta” switch ASIC for the Slingshot interconnect for quite a while before it started talking publicly about it. …
The handwriting has been on the wall for some time now, but Intel has quietly dropped its 200 Gb/sec Omni-Path networking from its roadmaps and will be using other technology for interconnects going forward. …
Hyperscalers change their datacenters – by which we mean whole generations of servers, storage, and switching – like regular enterprises upgrade server platforms. …
In one fell swoop, Intel has finally filled a giant hole in its switching product line by acquiring upstart Barefoot Networks, the creator of the P4 programming language for networking devices and the “Tofino” family of Ethernet switch ASICs that make use of it. …
If you want to see what real competition might look like at some point in the future of the server racket, look no further than the Ethernet switch market, where switch ASICs and the companies that build switches alike have to fight for every dollar and make it up in volume every year without pause. …
The related but distinct HPC and AI markets gave Nvidia a taste for building systems, and it looks like the company wants to control more of the hardware and systems software stack than it currently does given that it is willing to shell out $6.9 billion – just about all of the cash it has on hand – to acquire high-end networking equipment provider and long-time partner Mellanox Technologies. …
The need to host, process, and transmit more data, in less time and more securely, is putting huge strain on existing datacenter network, server, and storage architectures, with the demands of specific applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, image recognition, and data analytics exacerbating the problem. …
Architectural transitions for layers in the IT stack at hyperscalers can happen in a matter of years, and cloud builders and HPC centers can move at almost the same speed. …
Barefoot Networks is on a mission, and it is a simple one: To give datacenter switches the same kind of openness and programmability that X86 servers have enjoyed for decades in the datacenter. …
Having multiple related but distinct product lines turns a company into an economic engine that runs a lot smoother than an it would run with a single cylinder. …
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