Assessing The Tradeoffs Of NVM-Express Storage At Scale

NVM-Express isn’t new. Development on the interface, which provides lean and mean access to non-volatile memory, first came to light a decade ago, with technical work starting two years later through a work group that comprised more than 90 tech vendors. The first NVM-Express specification came out in 2011, and now the technology is going mainstream.

How quickly and pervasively remains to be seen. NVM-Express promises significant boosts in performance to SSDs while driving down the latency, which would be a boon to HPC organizations and the wider world of enterprises as prices for SSDs continue to fall and adoption …

Assessing The Tradeoffs Of NVM-Express Storage At Scale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Green500 Drives Power Efficiency For Exascale

Each year, at the ISC and SC supercomputing conference shows every year, a central focus tends to be the release of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. As we’ve noted in The Next Platform, the 25-year-old list may have some issues with it, but it still captures the imagination, with lineups of ever-more powerful systems that reflect the trend toward heterogeneity and accelerators and illustrate the growing competition between the United States and China for dominance in the HPC field, the continued strength of Japan’s supercomputing industry and the desire of European Union countries to …

Green500 Drives Power Efficiency For Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Symmetry Of Putting Fluid Dynamics In The Cloud

There has been a lot of talk about taking HPC technologies mainstream, taking them out of realm of research, education and government institutions and making them available to enterprises that are being challenged by the need to manage and process the huge amounts of data being generated through the use of such compute- and storage-intensive workloads such as analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

At The Next Platform, we have written about the efforts by systems OEMs likes IBM, Dell EMC, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and software makers like Microsoft and SAP to develop offerings that are cost-efficient and …

The Symmetry Of Putting Fluid Dynamics In The Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

HPE Aims HPC Servers, Storage At The Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been busy this year in the HPC space. The company in June unveiled three highly scalable systems optimized for parallel processing tasks and artificial intelligence workloads, including the first system developed from the vendor’s $275 million acquisition of supercomputer maker SGI last year. The liquid-cooled petascale HPE SGI 8600 system is based on SGI’s ICE XA architecture and is aimed at complex scientific and engineering applications. The system scales to more than 10,000 nodes and uses Nvidia’s Tesla GPU accelerators and high-speed NVLink interconnect technology.

At the same time, HPE introduced the Apollo 6000 Gen10, …

HPE Aims HPC Servers, Storage At The Enterprise was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

MapR Gives Single View Of Big Data

The enormous amount of data being generated will do companies little good if they can’t more easily gather it from multiple sources, store it, analyze it and gain important insights into it that will help them drive better business decisions. There are myriad challenges to all this, starting with the sheer amount of data that is being created. The data also is coming from many different sources, is at rest and in motion, is created on-premises, in the cloud, and at the network edge, and is ruled by different data governance policies.

For the past several years, MapR Technologies has …

MapR Gives Single View Of Big Data was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Breaking Memory Free Of Compute With Gen-Z

Servers have become increasingly powerful in recent years, with more processing cores being added and accelerators like GPUs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) being added, and the amount of data that can be processed is growing rapidly.

However, a key problem has been the enabling interconnect technologies to keep pace with server evolution. It is a challenge that last year spawned the Gen-Z Consortium, a group founded by a dozen top-tier tech vendors including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Dell EMC, AMD, Arm, and Cray that wanted to create the next-generation interconnect that can leverage existing tech while paving the way …

Breaking Memory Free Of Compute With Gen-Z was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Expanded Oracle Cloud Rains Down GPUs, Skylake Xeons

Oracle was late to the cloud game, but in recent years has moved aggressively to catch up. While still behind the top companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, Oracle is seeing gains in revenue and customers to its cloud environment, thanks in large part due to the hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers that use its various operating system, middleware, database, and application software.

The cloud revenue jump at Oracle is pretty steep. In a conference call discussing the most recent quarterly financial numbers, Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz noted that cloud revenue for the quarter …

Expanded Oracle Cloud Rains Down GPUs, Skylake Xeons was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Gordon Bell Looks Out Into A Parallel World

It was 31 years ago when Alan Karp, then an IBM employee, decided to put up $100 of his own money in hopes of solving a vexing issue for him and others in the computing field. When looking at the HPC space, there were supercomputers armed with eight powerful processors and designed to run the biggest applications of the day. However, there also were people putting 1,000 wimpy chips into machines that leveraged parallelism to run workloads, a rarity at the time.

According to Amdahl’s Law in 1986, even if 95 percent of a workload runs in parallel, the speedup …

Gordon Bell Looks Out Into A Parallel World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Europe Elbows For A Place At Exascale Table

When talking about the ongoing international race to exascale computing, it might be easy to overlook the European Union. A lot of the attention over the past several years has focused on the efforts by the United States and China, the world’s economic powerhouses and the centers of technology development.

Through its Exascale Computing Project, the United States is putting money and resources behind its plans to roll out the first of its exascale systems in 2021. For its part, China is planning at least three pre-exascale systems using mostly home-grown technologies, backed by significant investments by the Chinese …

Europe Elbows For A Place At Exascale Table was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Throws Its Full Support Behind Arm Server Chips

The gatekeeper to Arm in the datacenter has finally swung that gate wide open.

Red Hat has always been a vocal support of Arm’s efforts to migrate its low-power architecture into the datacenter. The largest distributer of commercial Linux has spent years working with other tech vendors and industry groups like Linaro to build an ecosystem of hardware and software makers to support Arm systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) in servers and to build standards and policies for products that are powered by the chips. The company was a key player in the development of the Arm Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) specification …

Red Hat Throws Its Full Support Behind Arm Server Chips was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Dell EMC Wants to Take AI Mainstream

One of the challenges vendors are trying address when it comes to artificial intelligence is expanding the technology and its elements of machine learning and deep learning beyond the realm of hyoerscalers and some HPC centers and into the enterprise, where businesses can leverage them for such workloads as simulations, modeling, and analytics.

For the past several years, system makers have been trying to crack the code that will make it easier for mainstream enterprises to adopt and deploy traditional HPC technologies, and now they want to dovetail those efforts with the expanding AI opportunity. The difference with enterprises is …

Dell EMC Wants to Take AI Mainstream was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Nutanix Expands Adds Breadth to Cloud Platform

Nutanix has been on a journey for well over a year to transform itself from a supplier for software for hyperconverged infrastructure to a company with a platform that allows enterprises to build private datacenter environments that give them the same kinds of tools, automation, agility, scalability and consumption options that they can find in public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Nutanix was one of several vendors whose software helped propel the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure space through partnerships with such top-tier system OEMs like Dell EMC, IBM and Lenovo, and is among the last independent companies standing, …

Nutanix Expands Adds Breadth to Cloud Platform was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Computing Is Bigger Than The Datacenter

For several years there has been the ongoing debate about ARM and its future in the datacenter. That debate goes on, but the talk is changing.

At the beginning of the decade, ARM Holdings, the company behind the ARM chip architecture that is now owned by Japanese high-tech conglomerate Softbank, said its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs were a good alternative to Intel’s dominant Xeon and derivative processors for servers and other hardware at a time when energy efficiency in systems was becoming increasingly important.

Over the years that has been speculation about when ARM-based chips would find a foothold …

Computing Is Bigger Than The Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Easing The Pain Of Prepping Data For AI

Organizations are turning to artificial intelligence and deep learning in hopes of being able to more quickly make the right business decisions, to remake their business models and become more efficient, and to improve the experience of their customers. The fast-emerging technologies will let enterprises gain more insight into the massive amounts of data they are generating and find the trends that normally would have been hidden from them. And enterprises are quickly moving in that direction.

A Gartner survey found that 59 percent of organizations are gathering information to help them build out their AI strategies, while the rest …

Easing The Pain Of Prepping Data For AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor

The global server market is increasingly driven by the hyperscalers, and the trendsetter for all of them is Amazon Web Services. The massive company dominates the fast-growing public cloud space, outpacing rivals like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud, and is the top consumer of servers among a group of hyperscalers that are becoming the most powerful buyers of systems and new components, such as processors.

This can be seen in the numbers. According to IDC analysts, hyperscalers in the first and second quarters this year made a significant push to deploy servers, with AWS accounting for more …

New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Juniper Dons Red Hat To Ease Cloud Migration

Distributed telecommunications cloud environments offer service providers a way to more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively deliver services to end users, but they come with their share of complexity, management headaches, integration challenges and coordinating operations among multiple cloud vendors.

In a recent survey by Juniper Networks, service providers noted that a lack of visibility into all parts of the network cloud was the most difficult challenge facing as they migrate to the cloud, and that more than half of respondents said they use two or more cloud vendors in their distributed environments, adding to the complexity and the lack …

Juniper Dons Red Hat To Ease Cloud Migration was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Wraps OpenStack In Containers

Red Hat is no stranger to Linux containers, considering the work its engineers have done in creating the OpenShift application development and management platform.

As The Next Platform has noted over the past couple of years, Red Hat has rapidly expanded the capabilities within OpenShift for developing and deploying Docker containers and managing them with the open source Kubernetes orchestrator, culminating with OpenShift 3.0, which was based on Kubernetes and Docker containers. It has continued to enhance the platform since. Most recently, Red Hat in September launched OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, which added upgraded security features and more consistency across …

Red Hat Wraps OpenStack In Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Fujitsu, NetApp Tag Team For Converged Infrastructure

Converged and hyperconverged infrastructure, those tightly integrated systems that bring together compute and storage into pre-tested and pre-configured stacks, continues to be in high demand from enterprises that are looking to rework their datacenters to become private clouds that can more easily and, in the long run, more cheaply host fast-emerging technologies like analytics, mobile applications, Internet of Things telemetry, virtual and augmented reality, and various software-defined infrastructure. These CI and HCI platforms are designed to bring greater flexibility and scalability, ease deployment and management, and reduce costs in areas such as acquisition and power consumption.

IDC analysts have been …

Fujitsu, NetApp Tag Team For Converged Infrastructure was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IBM Builds Private Cloud Stack With Kubernetes And Containers

When enterprises talk about cloud computing, they invariably talk about hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Not all of their workloads will run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform – or only on one public cloud, for that matter.

In highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, some workloads will run in private clouds hosted by the enterprises themselves for compliance, security, and privacy reasons. Companies that have invested millions of dollars in their datacenters over the years also will want to protect those investments by leveraging them for private clouds. What’s important to them is being …

IBM Builds Private Cloud Stack With Kubernetes And Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Google And Cisco Cross Pollenate A Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid clouds may be the direction many enterprises are heading in, but it is a path fraught with challenges.

Organizations may want to run some workloads in public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or IBM while keeping others in house on public clouds for such reasons ranging from security and privacy to protecting datacenter investments and regulatory compliance. The complexity and difficulty come in being able to easily and securely move workloads between the two environments and managing both in a streamlined way.

However, that is the direction many enterprises are going. IDC analysts found …

Google And Cisco Cross Pollenate A Hybrid Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.