Sometimes, a workload needs more memory, more compute, or more I/O than is available in the two socket server that has been the standard pretty much since the dot-com boom two decades ago. …
Given the rollout of the “ZZ” and “Boston” variants of its Power9 systems, which are aimed at customers who are building clusters and at midrange enterprises that use a Power System server as their main back-end system, you might be expecting for the Power Systems line at IBM to have had a big bump in the second quarter of this year. …
The irony, of course, is that there is never a summit when it comes to supercomputing. …
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is one of the flagship HPC facilities in Europe and it arguably has the most elegant and spiritual of datacenters in the world, located inside of Torre Girona Chapel. …
The challenge with many of the complex modern technologies that are coming into datacenters is making them easy and cheap enough for enterprises to use at a their own scale, which is much more limited than that of hyperscalers and cloud builders, and employing their own skillsets, which are also more limited. …
Back in the early 1990s, when IBM has having its near-death experience as the mainframe business faltered, Unix systems were making huge inroads into the datacenter, and client/server computing was pulling work off central systems and onto PCs, the company was on the ropes and probably close to bankruptcy. …
When IBM launched the OpenPower initiative publicly five years ago, to many it seemed like a classic case of too little, too late. …
It has taken nearly four years for the low end, workhorse machines in IBM’s Power Systems line to be updated, and the long awaited Power9 processors and the shiny new “ZZ” systems have been unveiled. …
The HPC crowd got a little taste of the IBM’s “Nimbus” Power9 processors for scale out systems, juiced by Nvidia “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators, last December with the Power AC922 system that is the basis of the “Summit” and “Sierra” pre-exascale supercomputers being built by Big Blue for the US Department of Energy. …
In a way, the processor market started moving in slow motion through 2017 as server makers and their customers were awaiting a veritable cornucopia of processor options, something the industry has not seen in many a year. …
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