IBM Storage Rides Up Flash And NVM-Express

IBM’s systems hardware business finished 2017 in a stronger position than it has seen in years, due in large part to the continued growth of the company’s stalwart System z mainframes and Power platform. As we at The Next Platform noted, the last three months of last year were also the first full quarter of shipments of IBM’s new System z14 mainframes, while the first nodes of the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the “Sierra” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began to ship.

Not to be overlooked was the strong performance of the IBM’s storage …

IBM Storage Rides Up Flash And NVM-Express was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Gen-Z Interconnect Ready To Restore Compute Memory Balance

For several years, work has been underway to develop a standard interconnect that can address the increasing speeds in servers driven by the growing use of such accelerators as GPUs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and the pressures put on memory by the massive amounts of data being generated and bottleneck between the CPUs and the memory.

Any time the IT industry wants a standard, you can always expect at least two, and this time around is no different. Today there is a cornucopia of emerging interconnects, some of them overlapping in purpose, some working side by side, to break …

Gen-Z Interconnect Ready To Restore Compute Memory Balance was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Look at What’s in Store for China’s Tianhe-2A Supercomputer

The field of competitors looking to bring exascale-capable computers to the market is a somewhat crowded one, but the United States and China continue to be the ones that most eyes are on.

It’s a clash of an established global superpower and another one on the rise, and one that that envelopes a struggle for economic, commercial and military advantages and a healthy dose of national pride. And because of these two countries, the future of exascale computing – which to a large extent to this point has been more about discussion, theory and promise – will come into sharper …

A Look at What’s in Store for China’s Tianhe-2A Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Even at the Edge, Scale is the Real Challenge

Neural networks live on data and rely on computational firepower to help them take in that data, train on it and learn from it. The challenge increasingly is ensuring there is enough computational power to keep up with the massive amounts of data that is being generated today and the rising demands from modern neural networks for speed and accuracy in consuming the data and training on datasets that continue to grow in size.

These challenges can be seen playing out in the fast-growing autonomous vehicle market, where pure-play companies like Waymo – born from Google’s self-driving car initiative – …

Even at the Edge, Scale is the Real Challenge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Google Boots Up Tensor Processors On Its Cloud

Google laid down its path forward in the machine learning and cloud computing arenas when it first unveiled plans for its tensor processing unit (TPU), an accelerator designed by the hyperscaler to speeding up machine learning workloads that are programmed using its TensorFlow framework.

Almost a year ago, at its Google I/O event, the company rolled out the architectural details of its second-generation TPUs – also called the Cloud TPU – for both neural network training and inference, with the custom ASICs providing up to 180 teraflops of floating point performance and 64 GB of High Bandwidth Memory. …

Google Boots Up Tensor Processors On Its Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Statistical View Of Cloud Storage

Cloud datacenters in many ways are like melting pots of technologies. The massive facilities hold a broad array of servers, storage systems, and networking hardware that come in a variety of sizes. Their components come with different speeds, capacities, bandwidths, power consumption, and pricing, and they are powered by different processor architectures, optimized for disparate applications, and carry the logos of a broad array of hardware vendors, from the largest OEMs to the smaller ODMs. Some hardware systems are homegrown or built atop open designs.

As such, they are good places to compare and contrast how the components of these …

A Statistical View Of Cloud Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

DARPA’s $200 Million JUMP Into Future Microelectronics

DARPA has always been about driving the development of emerging technologies for the benefit of both the military and the commercial world at large.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been a driving force behind U.S. efforts around exascale computing and in recent years has targeted everything from robotics and cybersecurity to big data to technologies for implantable technologies. The agency has doled out millions of dollars to vendors like Nvidia and Rex Computing as well as national laboratories and universities to explore new CPU and GPU technologies for upcoming exascale-capable systems that hold the promise of 1,000 …

DARPA’s $200 Million JUMP Into Future Microelectronics was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Machine Learning Opportunity in Manufacturing, Logistics

There is increasing pressure in such fields as manufacturing, energy and transportation to adopt AI and machine learning to help improve efficiencies in operations, optimize workflows, enhance business decisions through analytics and reduce costs in logistics.

We have talked about how industries like telecommunications and transportation are looking at recurrent neural networks for helping to better forecast resource demand in supply chains. However, adopting AI and machine learning comes with its share of challenges. Companies whose datacenters are crowded with traditional systems powered by CPUs now have to consider buying and bringing in GPU-based hardware that is better situated to …

The Machine Learning Opportunity in Manufacturing, Logistics was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Deep Learning is the Next Platform for Pathology

It is a renaissance for companies that sell GPU-dense systems and low-power clusters that are right for handling AI inference workloads, especially as they look to the healthcare market–one that for a while was moving toward increasing compute on medical devices.

The growth of production deep learning in medical imaging and diagnostics has spurred investments in hospitals and research centers, pushing high performance systems for medicine back to the forefront.

We have written quite a bit about some of the emerging use cases for deep learning in medicine with an eye on the systems angle in particular, and while these …

Deep Learning is the Next Platform for Pathology was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Networking With Intent

Networking has always been the laggard in the enterprise datacenter. As servers and then storage appliances became increasingly virtualized and disaggregated over the past 15 years or so, the network stubbornly stuck with the appliance model, closed and proprietary. As other datacenter resources became faster, more agile and easier to manage, many of those efficiencies were hobbled by the network, which could take months to program and could require new hardware before making any significant changes.

However slowly, and thanks largely to the hyperscalers and now telcos and other communications service providers, that has begun to change. The rise of …

Networking With Intent was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Google’s Vision for Mainstreaming Machine Learning

Here at The Next Platform, we’ve touched on the convergence of machine learning, HPC, and enterprise requirements looking at ways that vendors are trying to reduce the barriers to enable enterprises to leverage AI and machine learning to better address the rapid changes brought about by such emerging trends as the cloud, edge computing and mobility.

At the SC17 show in November 2017, Dell EMC unveiled efforts underway to bring AI, machine learning and deep learning into the mainstream, similar to how the company and other vendors in recent years have been working to make it easier for enterprises …

Google’s Vision for Mainstreaming Machine Learning was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A New Architecture For NVM-Express

NVM-Express is the latest hot thing in storage, with server and storage array vendors big and small making a mad dash to bring the protocol into their products and get an advantage in what promises to be a fast-growing market.

With the rapid rise in the amount of data being generated and processed, and the growth of such technologies as artificial intelligence and machine learning in managing and processing the data, demand for faster speeds and lower latency in flash and other non-volatile memory will continue to increase in the coming years, and established companies like Dell EMC, NetApp …

A New Architecture For NVM-Express was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Samsung Puts the Crunch on Emerging HBM2 Market

The memory market can be a volatile one, swinging from tight availability and high prices one year to plenty of inventory and falling prices a couple of years later. The fortunes of vendors can similarly swing with the market changes, with Samsung recently displacing Intel at the top of the semiconductor space as a shortage in the market drove up prices and, with it, the company’s revenues.

High performance and high-speed memory is only going to grow in demand in the HPC and supercomputing arena with the rise of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and graphics processing, and …

Samsung Puts the Crunch on Emerging HBM2 Market was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Bringing a New HPC File System to Bear

File systems have never been the flashiest segment of the IT space, which might explain why big shakeups and new entrants into the market don’t draw the attention they could.

Established vendors have rolled out offerings that primarily are based on GPFS or Lustre and enterprises and HPC organizations have embraced those products. However, changes in the IT landscape in recent years have convinced some companies and vendors to rethink file servers. Such changes as the rise of large-scale analytics and machine learning, the expansion of HPC into more mainstream enterprises and the growth of cloud storage all have brought …

Bringing a New HPC File System to Bear was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Machine Learning Drives Changing Disaster Recovery At Facebook

Hyperscalers have billions of users who get access to their services for free, but the funny thing is that these users act like they are paying for it and expect for these services to be always available, no excuses.

Organizations and consumers also rely on Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent for services that they pay for, too, and they reasonably expect that their data will always be immediately accessible and secure, the services always available, their search returns always popping up milliseconds after their queries are entered, and the recommendations that come to them …

Machine Learning Drives Changing Disaster Recovery At Facebook was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Everyone Wants A Data Platform, Not A Database

Every IT organization wants a more scalable, programmable, and adaptable platform with real-time applications that can chew on ever-increasing amounts and types of data. And it would be nice if it could run in the cloud, too.

Because of this, companies no longer think about databases, but rather are building or buying data platforms that are based on industry-standard technologies, big data tools like NoSQL and unified in a single place. It is a trend that started gaining momentum around 2010 and will accelerate this year, according to Ravi Mayuram, senior vice president of engineering and chief technology officer at …

Everyone Wants A Data Platform, Not A Database was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Microsoft Boosts Azure Storage With Flashy Avere

The future of IT is in the cloud, but it will be a hybrid cloud. And that means things will by necessity get complicated.

Public clouds from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and IBM offer enterprises the ability to access massive, elastic and highly scalable infrastructure environments for many of their workloads without having to pay the cost of bringing those capabilities into their on-premises environments, but there will always be applications that businesses will want to keep behind the firewall for security and efficiency reasons. That reality is driving the demand not only for the …

Microsoft Boosts Azure Storage With Flashy Avere was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Juniper Flips OpenContrail To The Linux Foundation

It’s a familiar story arc for open source efforts started by vendors or vendor-led industry consortiums. The initiatives are launched and expanded, but eventually they find their way into independent open source organizations such as the Linux Foundation, where vendor control is lessened, communities are able to grow, and similar projects can cross-pollinate in hopes of driving greater standardization in the industry and adoption within enterprises.

It happened with Xen, the virtualization technology that initially started with XenSource and was bought by Citrix Systems but now is under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The Linux kernel lives there, too, …

Juniper Flips OpenContrail To The Linux Foundation was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Enterprises Challenged By The Many Guises Of AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning, which found solid footing among the hyperscalers and is now expanding into the HPC community, are at the top of the list of new technologies that enterprises want to embrace for all kinds of reasons. But it all boils down to the same problem: Sorting through the increasing amounts of data coming into their environments and finding patterns that will help them to run their businesses more efficiently, to make better businesses decisions, and ultimately to make more money.

Enterprises are increasingly experimenting with the various frameworks and tools that are on the market …

Enterprises Challenged By The Many Guises Of AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Purified Implementation Of NVM-Express Storage

NVM-Express holds the promise of accelerating the performance and lowering the latency of flash and other non-volatile storage. Every server and storage vendor we can think of is working to bring NVM-Express into the picture to get the full benefits of flash, but even six years after the first specification for the technology was released, NVM-Express is still very much a work in progress, with capabilities like stretching it over a network still a couple of years away.

Pure Storage launched eight years ago with the idea of selling only all-flash arrays and saw NVM-Express coming many years ago, and …

A Purified Implementation Of NVM-Express Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.