• The Memory Scalability At The Heart Of The Machine

    June 15, 2017

    Much has been made of the ability of The Machine, the system with the novel silicon photonics interconnect and massively scalable shared memory pool being developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to already address more main memory at once across many compute elements than many big iron NUMA servers. With the latest prototype, which was unveiled last month, the company was able to address a whopping 160 TB of DDR4 memory.

    This is a considerable feat, but HPE has the ability to significantly expand the memory addressability of the platform, using both standard DRAM memory and as lower cost memories such …

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  • Fujitsu Looks to 3D ICs, Silicon Photonics to Drive Future Systems

    March 23, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

    The rise of public and private clouds, the growth of the Internet of Things, the proliferation of mobile devices and the massive amounts of data that need to be collected, stored, moved and analyzed that are being generated by such fast-growing emerging trends promise to drive significant changes in both software and hardware development in the coming years.

    Depending on who you’re talking to, there could be anywhere from 10 billion to 25 billion connected devices worldwide, self-driving cars are expected to rapidly grow in use in the next decade and corporate data is no longer housed primarily in stationary …

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  • Let There Be Light: The Year in Silicon Photonics

    December 14, 2016 Ben Cotton

    Computing historians may look back on 2016 as the Year of Silicon Photonics. Not because the technology has become ubiquitous – that may yet be years away – but because the long-awaited silicon photonics offerings are now commercially available in networking hardware. While the advancements in networking provided by silicon photonics are indisputable, the real game changer is in the CPU.

    For over half a century, Moore’s Law has been the name of the game. The transistor density on chips has been remarkably cooperative in doubling on schedule since Gordon Moore first made his observation in 1965. But Moore’s Law …

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  • Intel Leverages Chip Might To Etch Photonics Future

    August 17, 2016

    Computing has gone through a few waves. There was human to human computing in the first few decades, and in recent years it has been dominated by human to machine computing with hyperscale consumer-facing applications, and we are on the cusp of a third wave of machine to machine computing that will swell compute, storage, and networking to untold zettabytes of traffic.

    Under such data strain, there is an explosive need for bandwidth across datacenters as a whole, but particularly among hyperscalers with their hundreds of millions to billions of users. (Ironically, some datacenters are only now moving to 10 …

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  • Light at the End of the Silicon Photonics Tunnel

    January 21, 2016

    Silicon photonics has emerged as one of those areas of such far-reaching potential that its challenges and benefits tend to be clouded in generalities. Light as the main medium does indeed promise to alter fields including biological and chemical sensing, navigation, radio frequency sensing, communications, but for our purposes here, the potential within large-scale computing is of greater interest. On that point, take a look at the proceedings of a recent technical conference on photonic devices, noting the range of problem areas–not to mention potential applications. And these just skim the topical surface.

    On the computing interface and integration fronts, …

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  • Smashing The Server To Put It Back Together Better

    November 4, 2015

    Sometimes you have to break something to make it work right. While distributed computing in its myriad forms has done much to allow for massive scale and relative uniformity in the datacenter, the basic building block of a distributed computing cluster – the server – still looks largely the same as it did twenty years ago.

    That has to change, and it looks like it will with a movement that is underway that people are starting to call composable infrastructure.

    “This is definitely the next age of compute, there is no question about that,” James Leach, director of platform management …

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