EU Swaps JuQueen BlueGene/Q For Modular Xeon JUWELS Supercomputer

The European Union has never been willing to cede the exascale computing race to the United States, Japan, or China.

In recent years, Europe has ramped up its investments in the HPC space through such programs as Horizon 2020, an effort to grow R&D in Europe, and EuroHPC to drive development of exascale systems, and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), which aims to develop a distributed supercomputing infrastructure that will be accessible to researchers, businesses, and academic institutions throughout the EU. The SAGE project will create a multi-tiered storage platform for data-centric exascale computing to enable …

EU Swaps JuQueen BlueGene/Q For Modular Xeon JUWELS Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

DHL Gets Logical – And Logistical – About Machine Learning

For the past several years, machine learning as evolved by the hyperscalers has been trickling down from on high, through frameworks and services, into enterprises.

Machine learning is becoming a regular technique underpinning applications in a growing number of industries like manufacturing, energy, telecommunications and engineering, where companies see it as a way to not only reduce the costs and improve the efficiencies in their operations but also to more quickly detect patterns in and gain insights from the huge amounts of data they are generating. The goal is to making better and faster business decisions, and to …

DHL Gets Logical – And Logistical – About Machine Learning was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Pushing Up The Scale For Hyperconverged Storage

Hyperconverged storage is a hot commodity right now. Enterprises want to dump their disk arrays and get an easier and less costly way to scale the capacity and performance of their storage to keep up with application demands. Nutanix has a become as significant player in a space where established vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell EMC, and Cisco Systems are broadening their portfolios and capabilities.

But as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) becomes increasingly popular and begin moving up from midrange environments into larger enterprises, challenges are becoming evident, from the need to bring in new – and at times …

Pushing Up The Scale For Hyperconverged Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Evolution Of Hyperconverged Storage To Composable Systems

Hyperconverged infrastructure in some ways is like the credit card in those old TV ads: in this case, it’s everywhere that enterprises want to be. HCI put compute and storage on the same cluster, tightly integrate them with networking and unified management tools and essentially give enterprises a private cloud for the datacenter as well as pushing compute out to the edges in a consistent manner.

HCI also promises a bunch of other things beneficial to enterprises, including streamlined management, lower costs, faster speeds, and easier scalability than traditional IT systems to better address the rise of cloud computing, analytics, …

The Evolution Of Hyperconverged Storage To Composable Systems was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Dell EMC and Fujitsu Roll Intel FPGAs Into Servers

Nvidia caused a shift in high-end computing more than a decade ago when it introduced its general-purpose GPUs and CUDA development platform to work with CPUs to increase the performance of compute-intensive workloads in HPC and other environments and drive greater energy efficiencies in datacenters.

Nvidia and to a lesser extent AMD, with its Radeon GPUs, took advantage of the growing demand for more speed and less power consumption to build out their portfolios of GPU accelerators and expand their use in a range of systems, to the point where in the last Top500 list of the world’s fastest …

Dell EMC and Fujitsu Roll Intel FPGAs Into Servers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

AWS Puts More Muscle Behind Machine Learning And Database

Amazon Web Services essentially sparked the public cloud race a dozen years ago when it first launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and then in short order the Simple Storage Service (S3), giving enterprises access to the large amount compute and storage resources that its giant retail business leaned on.

Since that time, AWS has grown rapidly in the number of services it offers, the number of customers it serves, the amount of money it brings in and the number of competitors – including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle – looking to chip away …

AWS Puts More Muscle Behind Machine Learning And Database was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Startup Tackles Cloud Migration And Management Hassle

Enterprises can see cost and efficiency benefits when they migrate workloads into the cloud, but such moves also come with their share of challenges in complexity and management. This is particularly true as organizations embrace a compute environment that includes multiple clouds – both public and private – as well as one or more on-premises datacenters. True, the cloud enables businesses to easily scale up or down depending on the workloads they’re running, to pay for only the infrastructure they’re using rather than having to invest upfront in hardware, to put the onus of integration on the cloud providers, and …

Startup Tackles Cloud Migration And Management Hassle was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

HPE Aims Apollo at Enterprise AI

There continues to be an ongoing push among tech vendors to bring artificial intelligence (AI) and its various components – including deep learning and machine learning – to the enterprise. The technologies are being rapidly adopted by hyperscalers and in the HPC space, and enterprises stand to reap significant benefits by also embracing them.

As we’ve noted many times here at The Next Platform, at the most basic level, machine learning and deep learning can enable enterprises to quickly sort through and analyze the massive amounts of data that they’re collecting to find patterns that can lead to better …

HPE Aims Apollo at Enterprise AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Dell EMC Puts Open Networking on the Edge

Computing resources – including storage and networking – are continuing their march toward the network edge, drawn like a magnet to the rapidly proliferating connected devices in the world and the huge amounts of data that they’re generating that need to be collected, processed and analyzed.

As we’ve talked about here at The Next Platform over the past few months, the distributed nature of computing, fueled by such drivers as the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and greater mobility, and the demand for capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics to manage the data call for moving …

Dell EMC Puts Open Networking on the Edge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Reference Architecture for NVMe over Fabrics

Cavium has raised its profile over the past several years as one of the pioneers in developing Arm-based systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) for servers, rolling out multiple generations of its ThunderX chips in hope of pushing Arm’s low-power architecture make gains in a datacenter environment that for years has been dominated by Intel and its x86-based Xeons.

However, like similar chip makers, Cavium didn’t start with the Arm server chips, but instead built to that point atop a broad array of products for other areas of the datacenter, including adapters, controllers, switches and MIPS-based processors for networking and storage devices. …

A Reference Architecture for NVMe over Fabrics was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

FPGA Maker Xilinx Says the Future of Computing is ACAP

The field programmable gate space is heating up with new use cases driven by everything from emerging network, IoT, and application acceleration trends. Keeping ahead of the curve means expanding on devices that have quite steady improvement cycles, which means the few companies at the top need to get creative to stay competitive.

Xilinx and Altera – which was bought by Intel in 2015 for $16.7 billion – have been the top vendors of FPGAs, which can be programmed and reprogrammed, enabling organizations the ability to adapt the processors to the varying workloads running on the systems. The high price …

FPGA Maker Xilinx Says the Future of Computing is ACAP was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IBM Unwinds Tangled Data for Enterprise AI

These days, organizations are creating and storing massive amounts of data, and in theory this data can be used to drive business decisions through application development, particularly with new techniques such as machine learning. Data is arguably the most important asset, and it is also probably the most difficult thing to manage. Well, excepting people.

Data is tangled mess. It can be structured or unstructured, and it is increasingly scattered in different locations – in on-premises infrastructure, in a public cloud, on a mobile device. It is a challenge to move, thanks to the costs in everything from bandwidth to …

IBM Unwinds Tangled Data for Enterprise AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Sandia, NREL Look to Aquarius to Cool HPC Systems

The idea of bringing liquids in the datacenter to cool off hot-running systems and components has often unnerved many in the IT field. Organizations are doing it as they look for more efficient and cost-effective ways to run their infrastructures, particularly as the workloads become larger and more complex, more compute resources are needed, parts like processors become more powerful and density increases.

But the concept of running water and other liquids through a system, and the threat of the liquids leaking into the various components and into the datacenter, has created uneasiness with the idea.

Still, the growing demands …

Sandia, NREL Look to Aquarius to Cool HPC Systems was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

China’s Global Cloud and AI Ambitions Keep Extending

Gone are the days of early warehouse scale computing pioneers that were based in the U.S.. Over the last several years, China’s web giants are extending their reach through robust shared AI and cloud efforts—and those are pushing ever further into territory once thought separate.

Alibaba is much like compatriots Baidu and Tencent in its desire to expand well beyond the borders of China and compete with global players like Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Facebook in such fast-growing areas like the cloud, supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI).

The tech giant has significant resources at its disposal, pulling in …

China’s Global Cloud and AI Ambitions Keep Extending was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Accelerating HPC Investments In Canada

Details about the technologies being used in Canada’s newest and most powerful research supercomputer have been coming out in a piecemeal fashion over the past several months, but now the complete story.

At the SC17 show in November, it was revealed that the HPC system will use Mellanox’s Dragonfly+ network topology and a NVM Express burst buffer fabric from Excelero as key part of a cluster that will offer a peak performance of more than 4.6 petaflops.

Now Lenovo, which last fall won the contract for the Niagara system over 11 other vendors, is unveiling this week that it is …

Accelerating HPC Investments In Canada was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

U.S. Exascale Efforts Benefit in FY 2019 Budget

There was concern in some scientific quarters last year that President Trump’s election could mean budget cuts to the Department of Energy (DoE) that could cascade down to the country’s exascale program at a time when China was ramping up investments in its own initiatives.

The worry was that any cuts that could slow down the work of the Exascale Computing Project would hand the advantage to China in this critical race that will have far-reaching implications in a wide range of scientific and commercial fields like oil and gas exploration, financial services, high-end healthcare, national security and the military. …

U.S. Exascale Efforts Benefit in FY 2019 Budget was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

VMware Crafts Compute And Storage Stacks For The Edge

The rapid proliferation of connected devices and the huge amounts of data they are generating is forcing tech vendors and enterprises alike to cast their eyes to the network edge, which has become a focus of the distributed computing movement as more compute, storage, network, analytics and other resources are moving closer to where these devices live.

Compute is being embedded in everything, and this makes sense. The costs in time, due to latency issues, and money, due to budgetary issues, from transferring all that data from those distributed devices back to a private or public datacenter are too high …

VMware Crafts Compute And Storage Stacks For The Edge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

An Adaptive Approach to Bursting HPC to the Cloud

The HPC field hasn’t always had the closest of relationships with the cloud.

Concerns about the performance of the workloads on a hypervisor running in the cloud, the speed of the networking and capacity of storage, the security and privacy of the research data and results, and the investments of millions of dollars already made to build massive on-premises supercomputers and other systems can become issues when considering moving applications to the cloud.

However, HPC workloads also are getting more complex and compute-intensive, and demand from researchers for more compute time and power on those on-premises supercomputers is growing. Cloud …

An Adaptive Approach to Bursting HPC to the Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Lenovo Sees Expanding Market for Dense Water-Cooled HPC

The demands for more compute resources, power and density in HPC environments is fueling the need for innovative ways to cool datacenters that are churning through petabyte levels of data to run modern simulation workloads that touch on everything from healthcare and climate change to space exploration and oil and gas initiatives.

The top cooling technologies for most datacenters are air and chilled water. However, Lenovo is promoting its latest warm-water cooling system for HPC clusters with its ThinkSystem SD650 systems that the company says will lower datacenter power consumption by 30 to 40 percent of the more traditional cooling …

Lenovo Sees Expanding Market for Dense Water-Cooled HPC was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

HPE Brings More HPC To The DoD

Much of the focus of the recent high-profile budget battle in Washington – and for that matter, many of the financial debates over the past few decades – has been around how much money should go to the military and how much to domestic programs like Social Security and Medicare.

In the bipartisan deal struck earlier this month, both sides saw funding increase over the next two years, with the military seeing its budget jump $160 billion. Congressional Republicans boasted of a critical win for the Department of Defense (DoD) that will result in more soldiers, better weapons, and improved …

HPE Brings More HPC To The DoD was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.