AI
Deep Dive On Google’s Exascale TPUv4 AI Systems
It seems like we have been talking about Google’s TPUv4 machine learning accelerators for a long time, and that is because we have been. …
Cloud
Number Three Has To Work Very Hard In The Cloud
Being in the cloud business is difficult and expensive – even for a rich company like Google. …
Cloud
Google Follows Suit With Microsoft On Ampere Arm Instances
A long time ago, when we first started The Next Platform, Urs Hölzle, then senior vice president of the Technical Infrastructure team at Google, told us that to gain a 20 percent improvement in price/performance it would absolutely change from the X86 architecture to Power architecture – or indeed any other architecture – and even for one generation of machines. …
HPC
With Cloud HPC Toolkit, Google Pursues HPC, Intel Pushes OneAPI
The people running Google Cloud can see the tides of HPC changing and know that, as we discussed only a few months ago, there is a fairly good chance that more HPC workloads will move to cloud builders over time as their sheer scale increasingly dictates future chip and system designs and the economics of processing. …
AI
Neural Networks Are Only As Good As The Data They Are Fed
Like other kinds of computing, if you put garbage data into a machine learning training run and then pour new data through it, what comes out as the answer is puréed garbage. …
Store
Google Needs Another Database To Attack Oracle, DB2, And SQL Server Directly
Why does Google need another database, and why in particular does it need to introduce a version of PostgreSQL highly tuned for Google’s datacenter-scale disaggregated compute and storage? …
AI
Google Stands Up Exascale TPUv4 Pods On The Cloud
It is Google I/O 2022 this week, among many other things, and we were hoping for an architectural deep dive on the TPUv4 matrix math engines that Google hinted about at last year’s I/O event. …
HPC
Testing Out HPC On Google’s TPU Matrix Engines
In an ideal platform cloud, you would not know or care what the underlying hardware was and how it was composed to run your HPC – and now AI – applications. …
Connect
With Aquila, Google Abandons Ethernet To Outdo InfiniBand
Frustrated by the limitations of Ethernet, Google has taken the best ideas from InfiniBand and Cray’s “Aries” interconnect and created a new distributed switching architecture called Aquila and a new GNet protocol stack that delivers the kind of consistent and low latency that the search engine giant has been seeking for decades. …
Cloud
VMware Widens Its Road To The Cloud With Google Partnership
Google and VMware have announced a new element to their partnership that the two companies said will simplify cloud migrations, provide more flexibility, and help companies modernize their enterprise applications with a minimum amount of pain. …