Compute
Heating Up the Exascale Race by Staying Cool
High performance computing is a hot field, and not just in the sense that it gets a lot of attention. …
Power
Compute
Is This A Server Slowdown, Or Increasing Efficiency?
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. …
Cloud
The Server At Peak X86
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. …
Compute
Future Systems: What Will Tomorrow’s Server Look Like?
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. …
Compute
IBM Roadmap Extends Power Chips To 2020 And Beyond
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. …
Compute
IBM’s Power Roadmap Extended By Chip Breakthrough
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. …
HPC
Supercomputers Bump Against the End of Another Era
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. …
Compute
HPC Scales Out of Balance With CPU-Heavy Thinking
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. …
Compute
Google Looks Ahead To OpenPower Systems
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. …
Cloud
How This Battery Cut Microsoft Datacenter Costs By A Quarter
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. …