• Heating Up the Exascale Race by Staying Cool

    January 26, 2017 Ben Cotton

    High performance computing is a hot field, and not just in the sense that it gets a lot of attention. The hardware necessary to perform the countless simulations performed every day consumes a lot of power, which is largely turned into heat. How to handle all of that heat is a subject that is always on the mind of facilities managers. If the thermal energy is not moved elsewhere in short order, the delicate electronics that comprise the modern computer will cease to function.

    The computer room air handler (CRAH) is the usual approach. Chilled water chills the air, which …

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  • Is This A Server Slowdown, Or Increasing Efficiency?

    December 2, 2016

    If you happen to believe that spending on core IT infrastructure is a leading indicator of the robustness of national economies and the global one that is stitched, somewhat piecemeal like a patchwork quilt. From them, then the third quarter sales and shipments of servers is probably sounding a note of caution for you.

    It certainly does for us here at The Next Platform. But it is important, particularly if we have in fact hit the peak of the X86 server market as we mused about three months ago, to not get carried away. A slowdown in spending …

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  • The Server At Peak X86

    September 15, 2016

    One of the reasons why Dell spent $60 billion on the EMC-VMware conglomerate was to become the top supplier of infrastructure in the corporate datacenter. But even before the deal closed, Dell was on its way – somewhat surprisingly to many – to toppling Hewlett Packard Enterprise as the dominant supplier of X86 systems in the world.

    But that computing world is set to change, we think. And perhaps more quickly – some might say jarringly — than any of the server incumbents are prepared to absorb.

    After Intel, with the help of a push from AMD a decade ago, …

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  • Future Systems: What Will Tomorrow’s Server Look Like?

    February 4, 2016

    We can talk about storage and networking as much as we want, and about how the gravity of data bends infrastructure to its needs, but the server – or a collection of them loosely or tightly coupled – is still the real center of the datacenter.

    Data is useless unless you process it, after all. As more than a few companies that have built data lakes as a knee jerk reaction have come to realize.

    The server is where organizations spend the bulk of their budgets when they build platforms – excepting, of course, the vast sums they lavish on …

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  • IBM Roadmap Extends Power Chips To 2020 And Beyond

    August 10, 2015

    The cadence of server processor launches by the remaining companies that still etch their chips has slowed in recent years, starting first with the low-volume players like IBM, Oracle, and Fujitsu and now possibly spreading to Intel with its Xeon line and already baked in with its Xeon Phi line with a roughly three year span between generations. This slower cadence is driven by a number of factors, the most important of which is that shrinking transistors on the Moore’s Law curve is getting more difficult.

    Generally speaking, the chip industry thinks it can get down to 7 nanometers …

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  • IBM’s Power Roadmap Extended By Chip Breakthrough

    July 9, 2015

    Hot on the heels of the closing of the deal that divests its semiconductor business and places it in the hands of Globalfoundries, the former chip making business of AMD that is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, IBM and its academic and chip industry partners have announced that they have successfully etched chips with transistors that are 7 nanometers in size – significantly smaller than current processes and extending the Moore’s Law curve one more step.

    It is a big step, however, based on a mix of new technologies that have not been tested in volume production before, …

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  • Supercomputers Bump Against the End of Another Era

    April 23, 2015

    When one looks at major milestones in supercomputer history, one of the relatively recently markers rests with IBM, which began work its work to create a massively parallel system for protein folding research. Armed with an initial $100 million back in 1999, the IBM research team set its efforts on making an HPC platform that would be more scalable and usable than existing cluster architectures and provide new elements on the interconnect, chip design, and systems software side that would be relevant for other areas in scientific computing.

    The result of these efforts spawned BlueGene, which quietly hit the end …

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  • HPC Scales Out of Balance With CPU-Heavy Thinking

    March 19, 2015

    Evaluating the true performance of HPC systems has never been quite as simple as tracking incremental improvements across processor generations, but is increasingly focused on how these tweaks affect the entire stack–and whether such gains are even useful from a memory or I/O perspective. The processor is just one component of actual performance, especially as the needs of memory-bound and data movement oriented workloads in HPC and large-scale analytics grow. For this expanding set of applications, all the FLOPS in the world won’t mean as much as striking the right architectural balance.

    Focusing on memory bandwidth and integer performance over …

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  • Google Looks Ahead To OpenPower Systems

    March 18, 2015

    Search engine giant Google only talks about the underlying technology that it deploys in its datacenters years after they have been commercialized and a replacement has been developed and put into use. This way, Google contributes to the open source and broader IT communities, but it does not jeopardize its position as a titan of hyperscale technology.

    But OpenPower might be the exception to that rule. By joining up in federation that is steering the development of an open hardware base centered on IBM’s Power8 and future processors, Google may be tipping its cards a bit about technology that is …

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  • How This Battery Cut Microsoft Datacenter Costs By A Quarter

    March 13, 2015

    In yet another example of how distributed systems sometimes work better than centralized ones, the hardware engineers at Microsoft have come up with a new battery-backed power supply for their homegrown servers that allows for massive – and expensive – battery rooms to be eliminated from the cloud giant’s datacenters.

    The new power supply, which Microsoft calls the Local Energy Storage (LES) unit, was designed as part of the Open Cloud Server hyperscale system that the company donated to the Open Compute Project last year and updated last October with some significant tweaks. In the spirit of openness that might …

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