Compute engine makers can do all they want to bring the performance of their devices on par or even reasonably close to that of Nvidia’s various GPU accelerators, but until they have something akin to the NVLink and NVSwitch memory fabric that Nvidia uses to leverage the performance of many GPUs at bandwidths that dwarf PCI-Express switches and latencies that dwarf Ethernet interconnects, they can never catch up. …
For decades, we have been using software to chop up servers with virtualization hypervisors to run many small workloads on a relatively big piece of iron. …
Not every workload can be chunked up and spread across a relatively loosely coupled cluster of cheap X86 server nodes. …
Starting way back in the late 1980s, when Sun Microsystems was on the rise in the datacenter and Hewlett Packard was its main rival in Unix-based systems, market forces compelled IBM to finally and forcefully field its own open systems machines to combat Sun, HP, and others behind the Unix movement. …
While we are big fans of distributed computing systems here at The Next Platform, we never forget our heritage in big iron. …
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been building a mainstream and grassroots server business aimed at large enterprises, HPC centers, and academic and government institutions for two decades. …
It is hard to quantify the amount of effort in systems and application software development that has been done precisely because there is no easy, efficient, and cheap way to make a bunch of cheap commodity servers look like one wonking system with a big ole flat memory space that is as easy to program as a PC but which brings to bear all that compute, memory, and I/O of a cluster as a single system image. …
SGI has always had scalable technology that should have been deployed more broadly in the academic, government, and enterprise datacenters of the world. …
Supercomputer maker SGI has been going it alone in the upper echelons of the computing arena for decades and has brought much innovation to bear on some of the most intractable simulation, modeling, and analytics problems in the world. …
When supercomputer maker SGI tweaked its NUMA server technology to try to pursue sales in the datacenter, the plan was not to go it alone but rather to partner with the makers of workhorse Xeon servers that did not – and would not – make their own big iron but who nonetheless want to sell high-end machines to their customers. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform