When Globalfoundries decided to stop its development and rollout of both immersion lithography and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at the 7 nanometer process node back in August, it looked as if IBM, second only to AMD as a server chip customer for its most advanced fab in Malta, New York, would be left in a lurch with its future Power processors. …
The history of digital computing is to provide increasing levels of abstraction to get programmers further and further away from directly manipulating the ones and zeros. …
IBM and the other vendors who are bidding on the CORAL2 systems for the US Department of Energy can’t talk about those bids, which are in flight, and Big Blue and its partners in building the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and “Sierra” at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – that would be Nvidia for GPUs and Mellanox Technologies for InfiniBand interconnect – are all about publicly focusing on the present, since these two machines are at the top of the flops charts now. …
In one fell swoop that is going to cost Big Blue a whopping $34 billion, IBM is going to become a modern software powerhouse in the datacenter that has to be contended with in an entirely different way. …
Enterprises are looking at a future of multiple clouds and hybrid clouds where they can run not only their new cloud-native applications but also migrate many of their legacy workloads and take advantage of cost savings and the agility that comes with cloud computing. …
When you look at IBM, it is as if you are seeing many different instantiations of Big Blue across time playing out in the present, side by side. …
Historically and traditionally, academic supercomputing centers have been very open about the architecture and setup of their HPC systems, and it makes sense if you think about it. …
Making money from sand is not as easy as making money from oil, and the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which has been assembling the GlobalFoundries chip making giant for the past decade is finding that out the hard way and as a consequence, the company is backing off on its development of 7 nanometer manufacturing techniques, which included a double whammy of traditional immersion lithography techniques as well as a move towards bleeding-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology. …
In the wonderful world of software containers, it can feel like the ground is constantly shifting beneath your feet as new projects spring up to address problems that you thought had been solved long ago. …
Sometimes, a workload needs more memory, more compute, or more I/O than is available in the two socket server that has been the standard pretty much since the dot-com boom two decades ago. …
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