Sometimes HPC Means Big Memory, Not Big Compute

Not every HPC or analytics workload – meaning an algorithmic solver and the data that it chews on – fits nicely in a 128 GB or 256 GB or even a 512 GB memory space, and sometimes the dataset is quite large and runs best with a larger memory space rather than carving it up into smaller pieces and distributing across nodes with the same amount of raw compute. …

Sometimes HPC Means Big Memory, Not Big Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Where Latency Is Key And Throughput Is Of Value

If hardware doesn’t scale well, either up into a more capacious shared memory system or out across a network of modestly powered nodes, there isn’t much you can do about it. …

Where Latency Is Key And Throughput Is Of Value was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

For HPC And AI, Composability Might Trump Cheap Flops

Maximizing the aggregate amount of compute that can be brought to bear for any given pile of money is what traditional high performance computing is all about. …

For HPC And AI, Composability Might Trump Cheap Flops was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AMD Girds For Compute War With Xilinx Deal

The rumors were right, and AMD president and chief executive officer Lisa Su is indeed printing out a tower of stock to acquire FPGA maker Xilinx for what amounts to about $35 billion and, as it turns out, she is relinquishing her position as president to Victor Peng, chief executive at Xilinx, to close the deal. …

AMD Girds For Compute War With Xilinx Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Needs To Engineer Its Financial Future

Somewhere nearly a decade ago, we made a joke when looking at the rise of the hyperscalers and cloud builders. …

Intel Needs To Engineer Its Financial Future was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Resurrection Of Cray And AMD In A Trifurcating HPC Space

Success in any endeavor is not just about having the right idea, but having that idea at the right time and then executing well against that plan. …

The Resurrection Of Cray And AMD In A Trifurcating HPC Space was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

At Its Heart, IBM Remains A Systems Company

We have argued, even a decade and a half before The Next Platform was founded, that no one would ever move all of their IT infrastructure to a utility, what we now call a public cloud. …

At Its Heart, IBM Remains A Systems Company was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE And AMD Bag The Big Supercomputer Deal Down Under

Speaking very generally, investment in capability-class supercomputers by national governments tends to scale with gross domestic product. …

HPE And AMD Bag The Big Supercomputer Deal Down Under was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Networking: Not Just A Bag Of Parts

What is the hardest job at Intel, excepting whoever is in charge of the development of chip etching processes and the foundries that implement it? …

Intel Networking: Not Just A Bag Of Parts was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel To Amp Up Security With “Ice Lake” Xeon SP Servers

Security is one of those necessary things that should not be an afterthought, but often is, and ideally is so invisible that it doesn’t get in the way of applications and the infrastructure it runs on. …

Intel To Amp Up Security With “Ice Lake” Xeon SP Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It Takes Geological Patience To Change Datacenter Storage

Moving from an HPC center or a hyperscaler to work on enterprise software has to be a frustrating experience. …

It Takes Geological Patience To Change Datacenter Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Previews Ampere Kicker To Turing GPU Accelerator

We are still digging through the content coming out of the GTC 2020 fall conference and would be remiss if we didn’t talk a bit about the “Ampere” A40 and A6000 GPU accelerators that Nvidia is previewing. …

Nvidia Previews Ampere Kicker To Turing GPU Accelerator was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pondering That Rumored $30 Billion AMD Acquisition Of Xilinx

You can have a strategy, but you can’t buy one.

Nothing illustrates this principle more than the networking buying binges that both Intel and AMD went on nearly a decade ago, which did not really amount to much in the end but which made some sort of sense in the middle of it all happening. …

Pondering That Rumored $30 Billion AMD Acquisition Of Xilinx was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Jettisons Legacy Services To Focus On Hybrid Cloud

Today, the Gerstner era of International Business Machines is over, and the Krishna era is truly beginning, as Big Blue is spinning out the system outsourcing and hosting business that gave it an annuity-like revenue stream – and something of an even keel – in some rough IT infrastructure waters for two over decades. …

IBM Jettisons Legacy Services To Focus On Hybrid Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

One On One With Jensen Huang: Nvidia, The Platform Company

While a lot of ideas are ancient, some are relatively new and can come from only a modern context. …

One On One With Jensen Huang: Nvidia, The Platform Company was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why The DPU Is More Important Than The CPU For Nvidia

If you are fairly new to the IT racket, you might be under the impression that the waves of integration and disaggregation in compute, networking, and storage that swept over the datacenter in recent decades were all new, that somehow the issues of complexity and cost did not plague systems of the past. …

Why The DPU Is More Important Than The CPU For Nvidia was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

With “Crossroads” Supercomputer, HPE Notches Another DOE Win

When you come to the crossroads and make a big decision about selling your soul to the devil to get what you want, it is supposed to be a dramatic event, the stuff that legends are made of. …

With “Crossroads” Supercomputer, HPE Notches Another DOE Win was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It’s Back To The Future For Omni-Path InfiniBand

People in the modern era sometimes forget that networking predates the rise of Cisco Systems and the commercialization of the Internet. …

It’s Back To The Future For Omni-Path InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Betting On Mass Customization In A Post Moore’s Law World

If you wanted to wrest control of datacenter compute as embodied mainly in the Xeon SP processor away from Intel, there are a number of approaches that you might take. …

Betting On Mass Customization In A Post Moore’s Law World was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Era Of Big Memory Is Upon Us

If you reduce systems down to their bare essentials, everything exists in those systems to manipulate data in memory, and like human beings, all that really exists for any of us is what is in memory. …

The Era Of Big Memory Is Upon Us was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.