• Ethernet Getting Back On The Moore’s Law Track

    July 10, 2017

    It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the most, Ethernet got a little stuck in the mud.

    But Ethernet has pulls out of its boots and left them in the swamp and is back to being barefoot again on much more solid ground where it can run faster. The move from 10 Gb/sec …

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  • InfiniBand And Proprietary Networks Still Rule Real HPC

    June 30, 2017

    With the network comprising as much as a quarter of the cost of a high performance computing system and being absolutely central to the performance of applications running on parallel systems, it is fair to say that the choice of network is at least as important as the choice of compute engine and storage hierarchy. That’s why we like to take a deep dive into the networking trends present in each iteration of the Top 500 supercomputer rankings as they come out.

    It has been a long time since the Top 500 gave a snapshot of pure HPC centers that …

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  • HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand

    May 6, 2017

    Enterprise spending on servers was a bit soft in the first quarter, as evidenced by the financial results posted by Intel and by its sometime rival IBM, but the hyperscale and HPC markets, at least when it comes to networking, was a bit soft, according to high-end network chip and equipment maker Mellanox Technologies.

    In the first quarter ended March 31, Mellanox had a 4.1 percent revenue decline, to $188.7 million, and because of higher research and development costs, presumably associated with the rollout of 200 Gb/sec Quantum InfiniBand technology (which the company has talked about) and …

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  • The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox

    February 7, 2017

    We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass.

    It is with this in mind, and as more of a thought experiment than a desire, that we consider the fate of International Business Machines in the datacenter. In many ways, other companies have long …

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  • The Relentless Yet Predictable Pace Of InfiniBand Speed Bumps

    January 30, 2017

    High performance computing in its various guises is not just determined by the kind and amount of computing that is made available at scale to applications. More and more, the choice of network adapters and switches as well as the software stack that links the network to applications plays an increasingly important role. And moreover, networks are comprising a larger and larger portion of the cluster budget, too.

    So picking the network that lashes servers to each other and to their shared storage is important. And equally important is having a roadmap for the technology that is going to provide …

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  • Details Emerge On “Summit” Power Tesla AI Supercomputer

    November 20, 2016

    The future “Summit” pre-exascale supercomputer that is being built out in late 2017 and early 2018 for the US Department of Energy for its Oak Ridge National Laboratory looks like a giant cluster of systems that might be used for training neural networks. And that is an extremely convenient development.

    More than once during the SC16 supercomputing conference this week in Salt Lake City, the Summit system and its companion “Sierra” system that will be deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, were referred to as “AI supercomputers.” This is a reflection of the fact that the national labs around the …

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  • InfiniBand Breaks Through The 200G Barrier

    November 10, 2016

    Moore’s Law may be slowing down performance increases in compute capacity, but InfiniBand networking did not get the memo. Mellanox Technologies has actually picked up the pace, in fact, and is previewing 200 Gb/sec InfiniBand switches and server adapters that are timed to come to market with a slew of Xeon, Opteron, ARM, and Power processors due around the middle of next year.

    The new Quantum InfiniBand switch ASIC and its companion ConnextX-6 adapter ASICs come relatively hot on the heels of the 100 Gb/sec Enhanced Data Rate, or EDR, products that were announced in the fall of 2014 and …

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  • Server Encryption With An FPGA Offload Boost

    October 3, 2016

    Everyone talks about security on infrastructure, but it comes at a heavy cost. While datacenters have been securing their perimeters with firewalls for decades, this is far from sufficient for modern applications.

    Back in the early days of the Internet, all traffic was from the client in through the web and application servers to the back-end database that fed the applications – what is known as north-south traffic in the datacenter lingo. But these days, an application is a collection of multiple services that are assembled on the fly from all over the datacenter, across untold server nodes, in what …

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  • Ranking High Performance Interconnects

    July 14, 2016 Stephen Perrenod

    With the increasing adoption of scale-out architectures and cloud computing, high performance interconnect (HPI) technologies have become a more critical part of IT systems. Today, HPI represents its own market segment at the upper echelons of the networking equipment market, supporting applications requiring extremely low latency and exceptionally high bandwidth.

    As big data analytics, machine learning, and business optimization applications become more prevalent, HPI technologies are of increasing importance for enterprises as well. These most demanding enterprise applications, as well as high performance computing (HPC) applications, are generally addressed with scale-out clusters based on large numbers of ‘skinny’ nodes. The …

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  • Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects

    July 11, 2016

    Any time a ranking of a technology is put together, that ranking is always called into question as to whether or not it is representative of reality. Rankings, such as the Top 500 list of the top supercomputers in the world, has been the subject of such debate with regards to the Linpack Fortran performance benchmark that is used to create the rankings and its relevance to the performance of actual workloads. When it comes to networking, the changes in the list in recent years are likely a better reflection of what is going on in high performance computing in …

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