• Google Research Pushing Neural Networks Out of the Datacenter

  August 8, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  Google has been at the bleeding edge of AI hardware development with the arrival of its TPU and other system-scale modifications to make large-scale neural network processing efficient and fast.

  But just as these developments come to fruition, advances in trimmed-down deep learning could move many more machine learning training and inference operations out of the datacenter and into your palm.

  Although it might be natural to think the reason that neural networks cannot be processed on devices like smartphones is because of limited CPU power, the real challenge lies in the vastness of the model sizes and hardware memory …

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• How Google Wants To Rewire The Internet

  July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  When all of your business is driven by end users coming to use your applications over the Internet, the network is arguably the most critical part of the infrastructure. That is why search engine and ad serving giant Google, which has expanded out to media serving, hosted enterprise applications, and cloud computing, has put a tremendous amount of investment into creating its own network stack.

  But running a fast, efficient, hyperscale network for internal datacenters is not sufficient for a good user experience, and that is why Google has created a software defined networking stack to do routing over the …

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• 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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