Google Archives - The Next Platform

Under The Hood Of Google’s TPU2 Machine Learning Clusters

May 22, 2017 Paul Teich

As we previously reported, Google unveiled its second-generation TensorFlow Processing Unit (TPU2) at Google I/O last week. Google calls this new generation “Google Cloud TPUs”, but provided very little information about the TPU2 chip and the systems that use it other than to provide a few colorful photos. Pictures do say more than words, so in this article we will dig into the photos and provide our thoughts based the pictures and on the few bits of detail Google did provide.

To start with, it is unlikely that Google will sell TPU-based chips, boards, or servers – TPU2 …
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Does Google’s TPU Investment Make Sense Going Forward?

April 12, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Google created quite a stir when it released architectural details and performance metrics for its homegrown Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) accelerator for machine learning algorithms last week. But as we (and many of you reading) pointed out, comparing the TPU to earlier “Kepler” generation GPUs from Nvidia was not exactly a fair comparison. Nvidia has done much in the “Maxwell” and “Pascal” GPU generations specifically to boost machine learning performance.

To set the record straight, Nvidia took some time and ran some benchmarks of its own to put the performance of its latest Pascal accelerators, particularly the ones it aims …
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First In-Depth Look at Google’s TPU Architecture

April 5, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

Four years ago, Google started to see the real potential for deploying neural networks to support a large number of new services. During that time it was also clear that, given the existing hardware, if people did voice searches for three minutes per day or dictated to their phone for short periods, Google would have to double the number of datacenters just to run machine learning models.

The need for a new architectural approach was clear, Google distinguished hardware engineer, Norman Jouppi, tells The Next Platform, but it required some radical thinking. As it turns out, that’s exactly …
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Google Courts Enterprise For Cloud Platform

March 10, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

Google has always been a company that thinks big. After all, its mission since Day One was to organize and make accessible all of the world’s information.

The company is going to have to take that same expansive and aggressive approach as it looks to grow in a highly competitive public cloud market that includes a dominant player (Amazon Web Services) and a host of other vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. That’s going to mean expanding its customer base beyond smaller businesses and startups and convincing larger enterprises to store their data and run their workloads on its ever-growing …
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Google Expands Enterprise Cloud With Machine Learning

March 9, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

Google’s Cloud Platform is the relative newcomer on the public cloud block, and has a way to go before before it is in the same competitive sphere as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both of which deliver a broader and deeper range of offerings and larger infrastructures.

Over the past year, Google has promised to rapidly grow the platform’s capabilities and datacenters and has hired a number of executives in hopes of enticing enterprises to bring more of their corporate workloads and data to the cloud.

One area Google is hoping to leverage is the decade-plus of work and …
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Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It

February 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is an old joke that in the post-apocalyptic world that comes about because of plague or nuclear war, only two things will be left alive: cockroaches and Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones. As it hails from New York City, you can understand why Cockroach Labs, the upstart software company that is cloning Google’s Spanner distributed relational database, chose that particular bug to epitomize a system that will stay alive no matter what. But, they could have just as easily called it RichardsDB.

When discussing Google’s cloud implementation of Spanner, which launched in beta earlier this …
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Wrapping Kubernetes Around Applications Old And New

February 16, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

Kubernetes, the software container management system born out of Google, has seen its popularity in the datacenter soar in recent years as datacenter admins look to gain greater control of highly distributed computing environments and to take advantage of the advantages that virtualization, containers, and other technologies offer.

Open sourced by Google three years ago, Kubernetes is derived from the Borg and Omega controllers that the search engine giant created for its own clusters and has become an important part of the management tool ecosystem that includes OpenStack, Mesos, and Docker Swarm. These all try to bring order to what …
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Why Google’s Spanner Database Won’t Do As Well As Its Clone

February 15, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Google has proven time and again it is on the extreme bleeding edge of invention when it comes to scale out architectures that make supercomputers look like toys. But what would the world look like if the search engine giant had started selling capacity on its vast infrastructure back in 2005, before Amazon Web Services launched, and then shortly thereafter started selling capacity on its high level platform services? And what if it had open sourced these technologies, as it has done with the Kubernetes container controller?

The world would be surely different, and the reason it is not is …
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Why Google Is Driving Compute Diversity

January 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the ideal hyperscaler and cloud world, there would be one processor type with one server configuration and it would run any workload that could be thrown at it. Earth is not an ideal world, though, and it takes different machines to run different kinds of workloads.

In fact, if Google is any measure – and we believe that it is – then the number of different types of compute that needs to be deployed in the datacenter to run an increasingly diverse application stack is growing, not shrinking. It is the end of the General Purpose Era, which began …
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Google Wants Kubernetes To Rule The World

November 8, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

At some point, all of the big public cloud providers will have to eat their own dog food, as the parlance goes, and run their applications atop the cloudy version of their infrastructure that they sell to other people, not distinct and sometimes legacy systems that predate the ascent of their clouds. In this regard, none of the cloud providers are any different from any major enterprise or government agency that struggles with any kind of legacy system.

Search engine and online advertising giant Google wants its Cloud Platform business to compete against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and …
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