The Final Frontier: Talking Exascale With Oak Ridge’s Jeff Nichols

Just ahead of the revelations about the feeds and speeds of the “Frontier” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory concurrent with the International Supercomputing conference in Hamburg, Germany and the concurrent publishing of the summer Top500 rankings of supercomputers, we had a chat with Jeff Nichols, who has steered the creation of successive generations of supercomputers at Oak Ridge. …

The Final Frontier: Talking Exascale With Oak Ridge’s Jeff Nichols was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

To Cure Iron Anemia With SYCL, Intel Buys Codeplay

Intel doesn’t want to just create a rival to the CUDA programming model and library stack so it can better compete against Nvidia in the GPU compute market. …

To Cure Iron Anemia With SYCL, Intel Buys Codeplay was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Opening Up The Future “Venado” Grace-Hopper Supercomputer At Los Alamos

There are many interpretations of the word venado, which means deer or stag in Spanish, and this week it gets another one: A supercomputer based on future Nvidia CPU and GPU compute engines, and quite possibly if Los Alamos National Laboratory can convince Hewlett Packard Enterprise to support InfiniBand interconnects in its capability class “Shasta” Cray EX machines, Nvidia’s interconnect as well. …

Opening Up The Future “Venado” Grace-Hopper Supercomputer At Los Alamos was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Frontier: Step By Step, Over Decades, To Exascale

Any time you build anything with more than 60 million parts, it is going to be a headache. …

Frontier: Step By Step, Over Decades, To Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

At Long Last, HPC Officially Breaks The Exascale Barrier

Significant business and architectural changes can happen with 10X improvements, but the real milestones upon which we measure progress in computer science, whether it is for compute, storage, or networking, come at the 1,000X transitions. …

At Long Last, HPC Officially Breaks The Exascale Barrier was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Ampere Roadmap Has Four Future Arm Server Chips

This time last year, Arm server CPU startup Ampere Computing provided a roadmap running out through 2023 describing its future products, aimed at demonstrating its commitment to the idea of Arm server chips. …

Ampere Roadmap Has Four Future Arm Server Chips was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

With VMware, Broadcom Has A Real Enterprise Software Stack

Once Dell spun out VMware on Wall Street, it was only a matter of time before someone would put together enough money to acquire it. …

With VMware, Broadcom Has A Real Enterprise Software Stack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Datacenter Becomes Nvidia’s Largest Business

Something that we have been waiting for a decade and a half to see has just happened: The datacenter is now the biggest business at Nvidia. …

Datacenter Becomes Nvidia’s Largest Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Once Again, Meta Buys Rather Than Builds A Supercomputer

For a company that has been so enthusiastic about designing and building its own infrastructure and datacenters, Meta Platforms, the parent company to Facebook as well as WhatsApp and Instagram and one of the champions of the metaverse virtual reality a lot of us first read about in Burning Chrome, sure has not been building its own AI supercomputers lately. …

Once Again, Meta Buys Rather Than Builds A Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Covering All The Hardware – And Software – Bases With IPUs

Sponsored Feature Over the course of two decades, Intel drove the most important architectural change in the datacenter since the advent of the System/360 mainframe in the 1960s and the rise of RISC/Unix servers in the 1980s. …

Covering All The Hardware – And Software – Bases With IPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Value Proposition For Amazon’s Graviton3 Server Chip

As is well known, we like feed and speeds and slots and watts metrics here at The Next Platform for any kind of gear that runs in the datacenter. …

The Value Proposition For Amazon’s Graviton3 Server Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Adds Breadth And Depth To System Designs

The annual Computex computer expo in Taiwan is one of the places that IT vendors like to trot out some of their new wares, and most of the time they have to do with consumer electronics or maybe PCs and smartphones, but every now and then, we get some insight into future datacenter chippery or gear. …

Nvidia Adds Breadth And Depth To System Designs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cisco: Datacenter Demand Strong, Supply Not So Much

The good news, and we all need to be looking at the bright sides of things a bit these days is that the biggest IT shops in the world want to buy a lot of datacenter gear from Cisco Systems. …

Cisco: Datacenter Demand Strong, Supply Not So Much was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Most Obvious Hyperscaler To Do Custom Chips Was Always Facebook

Et tu, Meta?

Of all of the world’s hyperscalers and large cloud builders, only Meta Platforms, dominated by its Facebook and related social network businesses like Instagram and WhatsApp, is a pure-play hyperscaler. …

The Most Obvious Hyperscaler To Do Custom Chips Was Always Facebook was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Google Needs Another Database To Attack Oracle, DB2, And SQL Server Directly

Why does Google need another database, and why in particular does it need to introduce a version of PostgreSQL highly tuned for Google’s datacenter-scale disaggregated compute and storage? …

Google Needs Another Database To Attack Oracle, DB2, And SQL Server Directly was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Google Stands Up Exascale TPUv4 Pods On The Cloud

It is Google I/O 2022 this week, among many other things, and we were hoping for an architectural deep dive on the TPUv4 matrix math engines that Google hinted about at last year’s I/O event. …

Google Stands Up Exascale TPUv4 Pods On The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Unrolls DPU Roadmap, With A Two Year Cadence

There is a fundamental disconnect between the cadence that chip makers want for their devices and what the hyperscalers and cloud builders would prefer. …

Intel Unrolls DPU Roadmap, With A Two Year Cadence was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Pits New Gaudi2 AI Training Engine Against Nvidia GPUs

Nvidia is not the only company that has created specialized compute units that are good at the matrix math and tensor processing that underpins AI training and that can be repurposed to run AI inference. …

Intel Pits New Gaudi2 AI Training Engine Against Nvidia GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How Much Of A Premium Will Nvidia Charge For Hopper GPUs?

There is increasing competition coming at Nvidia in the AI training and inference market, and at the same time, researchers at Google, Cerebras, and SambaNova are showing off the benefits of porting sections of traditional HPC simulation and modeling code to their matrix math engines. …

How Much Of A Premium Will Nvidia Charge For Hopper GPUs? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Data Analytics Can Be The Next HPC For IBM Power

In the next few months, Big Blue will launch its entry and midrange Power10 servers, and to be blunt, we are not sure what the HPC and AI angle is going to be for these systems. …

Data Analytics Can Be The Next HPC For IBM Power was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.