Andy Patrizio
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Andy Patrizio
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Chip shrinking hits a wall: what it means for you
The semiconductor world is buzzing over the news that custom semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, the foundry born when AMD divested itself of its fabrication facilities, announced the sudden decision to drop its 7nm FinFET development program and restructure its R&D teams around “enhanced portfolio initiatives.”For now, GlobalFoundries will stick to 12nm and 14nm manufacturing. All told, approximately 5 percent (of roughly 18,000 employees) will lose their jobs. But it also sets back AMD, a GlobalFoundries customer, in its bid to get ahead of Intel, which has struggled for two years to get to 10nm and won’t get there until 2020.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] “The vast majority of today’s fabless customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node. Essentially, these nodes are transitioning to design platforms serving multiple waves of applications, giving each node greater longevity. This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore’s Law,” said Thomas Caulfield, who was named CEO of GlobalFoundries last March, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
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Data center staff are aging faster than the equipment
What is rapidly aging and largely male? If you said the heavy metal music scene, you wouldn’t be wrong (c’est moi), but that’s not the answer in this instance. It’s data center staffing.In its recent report on data center efficiency, Uptime Institute focused primarily on outages and the improvement in power efficiency, but there were other interesting findings, such as this:Data center staff are getting older on average, and women show no interest in the job.[ Now read: 20 hot jobs ambitious IT pros should shoot for ] New skills needed for hybrid IT environments According to the report, there is a growing need for new skills in an increasingly hybrid IT environment. New skills, such as overseeing and managing SLAs for off-premises workloads, are needed, but people don’t have them. Just 35 percent of survey respondents reported that they did not have any of the hiring or staffing issues identified by Uptime.To read this article in full, please click here
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Data center staff are aging faster than the equipment
What is rapidly aging and largely male? If you said the heavy metal music scene, you wouldn’t be wrong (c’est moi), but that’s not the answer in this instance. It’s data center staffing.In its recent report on data center efficiency, Uptime Institute focused primarily on outages and the improvement in power efficiency, but there were other interesting findings, such as this:Data center staff are getting older on average, and women show no interest in the job.[ Now read: 20 hot jobs ambitious IT pros should shoot for ] New skills needed for hybrid IT environments According to the report, there is a growing need for new skills in an increasingly hybrid IT environment. New skills, such as overseeing and managing SLAs for off-premises workloads, are needed, but people don’t have them. Just 35 percent of survey respondents reported that they did not have any of the hiring or staffing issues identified by Uptime.To read this article in full, please click here
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Will Fujitsu be the first to make an ARM-powered supercomputer?
I’ve long felt Japan has been severely overlooked in recent years due to two “lost decades” and China overshadowing it — and supercomputing is no exception.In 2011, Fujitsu launched the K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. Calling it a computer really is a misnomer, though, as is the case in any supercomputer these days. When I think “computer,” I think of the 3-foot-tall black tower a few feet from me making the room warm. In the case of K, it’s rows and rows of cabinets stuffed with rack-mounted servers in a space the size of a basketball court.With its distributed memory architecture, K had 88,128 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors in 864 cabinets. Fujitsu was a licensee of Sun Microsystems’ SPARC processor (later Oracle) and did some impressive work on the processor on its own. When it launched in 2011, the K was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list, at a computation speed of over 8 petaflops. It has since been surpassed by supercomputers from the U.S. and China.To read this article in full, please click here
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Will Fujitsu be the first to make an ARM-powered supercomputer?
I’ve long felt Japan has been severely overlooked in recent years due to two “lost decades” and China overshadowing it — and supercomputing is no exception.In 2011, Fujitsu launched the K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. Calling it a computer really is a misnomer, though, as is the case in any supercomputer these days. When I think “computer,” I think of the 3-foot-tall black tower a few feet from me making the room warm. In the case of K, it’s rows and rows of cabinets stuffed with rack-mounted servers in a space the size of a basketball court.With its distributed memory architecture, K had 88,128 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors in 864 cabinets. Fujitsu was a licensee of Sun Microsystems’ SPARC processor (later Oracle) and did some impressive work on the processor on its own. When it launched in 2011, the K was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list, at a computation speed of over 8 petaflops. It has since been surpassed by supercomputers from the U.S. and China.To read this article in full, please click here
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Dell EMC rolls out future-proofed high-performance servers
Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here
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Dell EMC rolls out future-proofed high-performance servers
Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here
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Microsoft, Salesforce plan to open source major enterprise software products
Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.To read this article in full, please click here
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Microsoft, Salesforce plan to open source major enterprise software products
Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.To read this article in full, please click here
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Microsoft, Salesforce plan to open source major enterprise software products
Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.To read this article in full, please click here
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Data center power efficiency increases, but so do power outages
A survey from the Uptime Institute found that while data centers are getting better at managing power than ever before, the rate of failures has also increased — and there is a causal relationship.The Global Data Center Survey report from Uptime Institute gathered responses from nearly 900 data center operators and IT practitioners, both from major data center providers and from private, company-owned data centers.It found that the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers has hit an all-time low of 1.58. By way of contrast, the average PUE in 2007 was 2.5, then dropped to 1.98 in 2011, and to 1.65 in the 2013 survey.To read this article in full, please click here
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Data center power efficiency increases, but so do power outages
A survey from the Uptime Institute found that while data centers are getting better at managing power than ever before, the rate of failures has also increased — and there is a causal relationship.The Global Data Center Survey report from Uptime Institute gathered responses from nearly 900 data center operators and IT practitioners, both from major data center providers and from private, company-owned data centers.It found that the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers has hit an all-time low of 1.58. By way of contrast, the average PUE in 2007 was 2.5, then dropped to 1.98 in 2011, and to 1.65 in the 2013 survey.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel continues to optimize its products around AI
Normally, this is the time of year when Intel would hold its Intel Developer Forum conference, which would be replete with new product announcements. But with the demise of the show last year, the company instead held an all-day event that it live-streamed over the web.The company’s Data Centric Innovation Summit was the backdrop for a series of processor and memory announcements aimed at the data center and artificial intelligence, in particular. Even though Intel is without a leader, it still has considerable momentum. Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, did the heavy lifting.News about Cascade Lake, the rebranded Xeon server chip First is news around the Xeon Scalable processor, the rebranded Xeon server chip. The next-generation chip, codenamed “Cascade Lake,” will feature a memory controller for Intel’s new Intel Optane DC persistent memory and an embedded AI accelerator that the company claims will speed up deep learning inference workloads by eleven-fold compared with current-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel continues to optimize its products around AI
Normally, this is the time of year when Intel would hold its Intel Developer Forum conference, which would be replete with new product announcements. But with the demise of the show last year, the company instead held an all-day event that it live-streamed over the web.The company’s Data Centric Innovation Summit was the backdrop for a series of processor and memory announcements aimed at the data center and artificial intelligence, in particular. Even though Intel is without a leader, it still has considerable momentum. Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, did the heavy lifting.News about Cascade Lake, the rebranded Xeon server chip First is news around the Xeon Scalable processor, the rebranded Xeon server chip. The next-generation chip, codenamed “Cascade Lake,” will feature a memory controller for Intel’s new Intel Optane DC persistent memory and an embedded AI accelerator that the company claims will speed up deep learning inference workloads by eleven-fold compared with current-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.To read this article in full, please click here
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Chip maker TSMC will lose millions for not patching its computers
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), whose customers include Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and Broadcom, was hit with a WannaCry infection last weekend that knocked out production for a few days and will cost the firm millions of dollars.Most chip companies are fabless, meaning they don’t make their own chips. It’s a massively expensive process, as Intel has learned. Most, like the aforementioned firms, simply design the chips and farm out the manufacturing process, and TSMC is by far the biggest player in that field.CEO C.C. Wei told Bloomberg that TSMC wasn’t targeted by a hacker; it was an infected production tool provided by an unidentified vendor that was brought into the company. The company is overhauling its procedures after encountering a virus more complex than initially thought, he said.To read this article in full, please click here
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Chip maker TSMC will lose millions for not patching its computers
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), whose customers include Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and Broadcom, was hit with a WannaCry infection last weekend that knocked out production for a few days and will cost the firm millions of dollars.Most chip companies are fabless, meaning they don’t make their own chips. It’s a massively expensive process, as Intel has learned. Most, like the aforementioned firms, simply design the chips and farm out the manufacturing process, and TSMC is by far the biggest player in that field.CEO C.C. Wei told Bloomberg that TSMC wasn’t targeted by a hacker; it was an infected production tool provided by an unidentified vendor that was brought into the company. The company is overhauling its procedures after encountering a virus more complex than initially thought, he said.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel ends the Xeon Phi product line
You can scratch the Xeon Phi off your shopping list. And if you deployed it, don’t plan on upgrades. That's because Intel has quietly killed off its high-performance computing co-processor because forthcoming Xeon chips have all the features of the Phi, no separate chip or add-in card needed.Intel quietly ended the life of the Xeon Phi on July 23 with a “Product Change Notification” that contained Product Discontinuance/End of Life information for the entire Knight’s Landing line of Xeon Phis.The last order date for the Xeon Phi is Aug. 31, 2018, and orders are non-cancelable and non-returnable after that date. The final shipment date is set for July 19, 2019.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel ends the Xeon Phi product line
You can scratch the Xeon Phi off your shopping list. And if you deployed it, don’t plan on upgrades. That's because Intel has quietly killed off its high-performance computing co-processor because forthcoming Xeon chips have all the features of the Phi, no separate chip or add-in card needed.Intel quietly ended the life of the Xeon Phi on July 23 with a “Product Change Notification” that contained Product Discontinuance/End of Life information for the entire Knight’s Landing line of Xeon Phis.The last order date for the Xeon Phi is Aug. 31, 2018, and orders are non-cancelable and non-returnable after that date. The final shipment date is set for July 19, 2019.To read this article in full, please click here
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Seagate announces new flash drives for hyperscale markets
The Flash Memory Summit is taking place in Santa Clara, California, this week, which means a whole lot of SSD-related announcements headed my way. One already has my attention for the unique features the vendor is bringing to an otherwise dull market.Seagate is expanding the Nytro portfolio of SSD products with emphasis on the enterprise and hyperscale markets and focusing on read-intensive workloads such as big data and artificial intelligence (AI). It has some of the usual areas of emphasis: lower power requirements and capacity that scales from 240GB to 3.8TB.[ Learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights, sign up for Network World newsletters. ] Also being updated is data protection via Seagate Secure, which prevents data loss during power failure by enabling data inflight to be saved to the NAND flash. The DuraWrite feature increases random write performance by up to 120 percent or provides maximum capacity to the user.To read this article in full, please click here
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Nutanix expands on-premises desktop offerings with Frame buy
Nutanix, maker of hyperconverged systems for building on-premises cloud-like environments, has agreed to buy Frame, a supplier of desktop apps as a service.Nutanix already supports virtual desktop infrastructure; adding Frame expands on the offering because Frame specializes in high-performance, specialized apps, rather than just a generic Windows or Linux desktop.Frame, also known as Mainframe2, was founded as a cloud workstation platform, providing desktop applications as a service but with the considerable scale from the server. Clients can get the performance of a super-powered desktop workstation from their laptop thanks to streaming of compute-intensive apps from the cloud to a browser.To read this article in full, please click here