Mellanox got its start as one of the several suppliers of ASICs for the low latency InfiniBand protocol that was originally conceived as a kind of universal fabric to connect all devices in the datacenter. …
If you really want to know what is going on in the HPC market, you have to be careful about using the Top 500 rankings of “supercomputers” as a yardstick. …
The cost of servers keeps going up and up, thanks in large part to memory, flash, and GPU prices rising as too much demand chases too little supply and also due in part to the rising cost of processors. …
Breaking into any part of the IT stack against incumbents with vast installed bases is not easy task. …
It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. …
The expression, the tail wags the dog, is used when a seemingly unimportant factor or infrequent event actually dominates the situation. …
Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. …
The best way to make a wave is to make a big splash, which is something that Andy Bechtolsheim, perhaps the most famous serial entrepreneur in IT infrastructure, is very good at doing. …
If it were not for the insatiable bandwidth needs of the twenty major hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is safe to say that the innovation necessary to get Ethernet switching and routing up to 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec might not have been done at the fast pace that the industry as been able to pull off. …
If you want to get a microcosmic view of the epic battle between Ethernet and InfiniBand (which also includes Omni-Path no matter how much Intel protests) as they relate to high performance computing in its many modern guises, there is perhaps no better place to look at what Mellanox Technologies is selling. …
All Content Copyright 2017 The Next Platform
