With machine learning taking off among hyperscalers and others who have massive amounts of data to chew on to better serve their customers and traditional simulation and modeling applications scaling better across multiple GPUs, all server makers are in an arm’s race to see how many GPUs they can cram into their servers to make bigger chunks of compute available to applications. …
The IT industry spends a lot of time obsessing about Moore’s Law and whether it is alive well or heading for the old folks home. …
The workhorse of the datacenter, the Xeon E5 processor, is getting a bit stronger today and will be able to pull slightly heavier workloads through the datacenter with the launch of the “Broadwell” Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors. …
The tick-tock of Intel’s Xeon server chip product cycles means that some generations are more important than others, and while we welcome the “Broadwell” Xeon E5 v4 chips that are impending, it is safe to say that the confluence of the “Skylake” Xeon E5 v5 chips with a slew of new memory and fabric technologies next year will quite possibly be the most transformative year we have seen in systems since the “Nehalem” Xeon launch back in March 2009. …
The hyperscaler and HPC organizations of the world are not the only places where innovation happens with infrastructure. …
It is convenient, perhaps, that large scale computing evolved just about the time the easiest and biggest strikes for oil and natural gas were over. …
HPC centers like to boast about the details of their supercomputing systems because they are political machines as much as they are tools for running simulations. …
Breaking into the datacenter with a new chip architecture is probably more difficult than getting by the security in a modern glass house and literally breaking into it, either physically or digitally over the wire. …
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. …
Intel had been warning for several months that revenues for its Data Center Group would decelerate a bit as 2015 wound down, and this has indeed happened. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform