If there is one thing that is consistently true about HPC clusters for the past thirty years and for AI training systems for the past decade, it is as workloads grow, the network becomes increasingly important – and perhaps as important as packing as much flops in a node as physically and thermally makes sense. …
A decade and a half ago, when Dennard scaling ran out of gas and many of us were starting to first think about what the end of Moore’s Law might look like should that day ever come, a bunch of us were kicking around what it might mean. …
We have been excited about the possibilities of adding tiers of memory to systems, particularly persistent memories that are less expensive than DRAM but offer similar-enough performance and functionality to be useful. …
For a company that has been so enthusiastic about designing and building its own infrastructure and datacenters, Meta Platforms, the parent company to Facebook as well as WhatsApp and Instagram and one of the champions of the metaverse virtual reality a lot of us first read about in Burning Chrome, sure has not been building its own AI supercomputers lately. …
Et tu, Meta?
Of all of the world’s hyperscalers and large cloud builders, only Meta Platforms, dominated by its Facebook and related social network businesses like Instagram and WhatsApp, is a pure-play hyperscaler. …
The datacenter server has been the center of gravity for compute for decades. …
Any company making any kind of box – a server, a switch, a storage array – has three battles they need to fight here in 2022, one of which they did not have to worry about very much before the coronavirus pandemic and which is of prime importance these days. …
As we have pointed out before, large enterprises have to deal with a different kind of scale issue than the hyperscalers, and in many ways, the hyperscalers have it easier. …
Sometimes, you do put new wine in old bottles. This is what it looks like Meta – well, really its Facebook social network group – is doing as it adds a microserver node based on a custom AMD “Milan” Epyc 7003 processor to its datacenter infrastructure. …
If you want to build the world’s largest social network, with 2.9 billion users, and the massive PHP stack that makes it into an application, you need a lot of infrastructure and you need it to arrive predictably. …
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