Cloud
Microsoft Azure Adds GPUs, Beefs Up CPU Compute
For certain kinds of modeling, simulation, and machine learning workloads, the advent of GPU coprocessors has been a watershed event. …
Microsoft
Connect
Microsoft Crafts Homegrown Linux For Azure Switches
Microsoft doesn’t just love running Linux workloads on the Azure cloud. …
Cloud
Arista Wields Tomahawks In 25G Ethernet Price War
It looks like networking price war is getting set to break out in the largest datacenters of the world, and this is precisely what Google and Microsoft had in mind when they formed the 25G Ethernet consortium back in July 2014. …
Compute
Back To The Future Of Scale
There are many different kinds of scale that system architects are wrestling with, and over the five decades of the modern computer business, a number of techniques have been employed, often concurrently in the same system, to try to goose the overall performance of machinery over time. …
Compute
Microsoft Extends FPGA Reach From Bing To Deep Learning
After three years of research into how it might accelerate its Bing search engine using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Microsoft came up with a scheme that would let it lash Stratix V devices from Altera to the two-socket server nodes in the minimalist Open Cloud Servers that it has designed expressly for its hyperscale datacenters. …
Compute
Embracing And Extending With Docker Containers
It is still early days in the software container revolution, and Microsoft is working as fast as it can to be able to leverage Docker containers and minimalist operating systems to make its Windows Server stack competitive with other platforms. …
Cloud
New Norms Of Managing The Hybrid Enterprise
A CIO’s job – to deliver highly available, interconnected systems and acceptable end user performance – was hard enough back in the days when all apps and systems ran under the same roof. …
AI
Microsoft Research Sees Narrowing Innovation Gap in Deep Learning
A lead deep learning expert at Microsoft Research thinks the low-hanging fruit for progress in deep neural networks has been picked and that for the next couple of years, refinement of neural networks and deep learning algorithms will be isolated and incremental. …
Control
HP Follows Hyperscale Lead With Composable Infrastructure
The people in the systems business at Hewlett-Packard have finally caught the DevOps bug. …
Compute
Altera Points To The FPGA Writing On The Wall
For those who marveled at the $16.7 billion deal Intel made to acquire field programmable gate array maker, Altera, an equal number raised eyebrows at the estimate given by Intel CEO to announce the purchase that one-third of cloud workloads would take advantage of FPGA acceleration by 2020. …