Deep Learning Is Coming Of Age

In the early days of artificial intelligence, Hans Moravec asserted what became known as Moravec’s paradox: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

This assertion is now unraveling primarily due to the ascent of deep learning. …

Deep Learning Is Coming Of Age was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Someone Has To Pay To Push The Bleeding Edge Of Systems

When you look at IBM, it is as if you are seeing many different instantiations of Big Blue across time playing out in the present, side by side. …

Someone Has To Pay To Push The Bleeding Edge Of Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Hadoop And Spark Get A Vector Performance Boost

Ever since the “Aurora” vector processor designed by NEC was launched last year, we have been wondering if it might be used as a tool to accelerate workloads other than the traditional HPC simulation and modeling jobs that are based on crunching numbers in single and double precision floating point. …

Hadoop And Spark Get A Vector Performance Boost was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

A New Datacenter Compels Arm To Create A New Chip Line

The gap between processor architectures in the datacenter server and on the desktop or on our laps or now in our hands thanks to transistor shrinks over the past decade is getting bigger. …

A New Datacenter Compels Arm To Create A New Chip Line was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Where The FPGA Hits The Server Road For Inference Acceleration

There are an increasing number of ways to do machine learning inference in the datacenter, but one of the increasingly popular means of running inference workloads is the combination of traditional CPUs acting as a host for FPGAs that run the bulk of the inferring. …

Where The FPGA Hits The Server Road For Inference Acceleration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Teasing Out The Bang For The Buck Of Inference Engines

There is a battle heating up in the datacenter, and there are tens of billions of dollars at stake as chip makers chase the burgeoning market for engines that do machine learning inference. …

Teasing Out The Bang For The Buck Of Inference Engines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Shooting The Machine Learning Rapids With Open Source

There are a lot of different kinds of machine learning, and some of them are not based exclusively on deep neural networks that learn from tagged text, audio, image, and video data to analyze and sometimes transpose that data into a different form. …

Shooting The Machine Learning Rapids With Open Source was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Hadoop Needs To Be A Business, Not Just A Platform

It is safe to say that a little more than a decade ago, when the clone of Google’s MapReduce and Google File System distributed storage and computing platform was cloned at Yahoo and offered up to the world as a way to transform the nature of data analytics at scale, that we all had much higher hopes for the emergence of platforms centered around Hadoop that would change enterprise, not just webscale, computing. …

Hadoop Needs To Be A Business, Not Just A Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

In A Parallel Universe, Data Warehouses Run On GPUs

Many programs have a tough time spanning across high levels of concurrency, but if they are cleverly coded, databases can make great use of massively parallel compute based in hardware to radically speed up the time it takes to run complex queries against large datasets. …

In A Parallel Universe, Data Warehouses Run On GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Inferring The Future Of The FPGA, And Then Making It

Technologies often start out in one place and then find themselves in another. …

Inferring The Future Of The FPGA, And Then Making It was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Open Compute A Foot In the Datacenter Door For Inspur

It is certainly true that no technology company can grow if they are not able to do business in China. …

Open Compute A Foot In the Datacenter Door For Inspur was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Virtualization Is The Real Opportunity For Epyc

The fleet of servers in the enterprise datacenters of the world – distinct from hyperscalers, cloud builders, and HPC centers – are getting a bit long in the tooth. …

Virtualization Is The Real Opportunity For Epyc was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

How OpenStack Lassoes Yahoo’s 4 Million Server Cores

As one of the first hyperscalers in the world, Yahoo, part of the Oath conglomerate that also includes AOL and that is owned by telecom giant Verizon, knows a thing or two about running applications at extreme scale. …

How OpenStack Lassoes Yahoo’s 4 Million Server Cores was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Forging A Hybrid CPU-FPGA Supercomputer

It is hard to say for sure, but a very substantial part of the hard work in buying supercomputers and creating simulations and models that tell us about the real world around us gets done in thousands of academic research institutions worldwide. …

Forging A Hybrid CPU-FPGA Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Microsoft Focuses Azure More Tightly On HPC And AI

For any public cloud to succeed, it has to offer best of breed technologies reasonably close to the cutting edge and supporting the wide variety of compute that the enterprises of the world would otherwise acquire and run on premises. …

Microsoft Focuses Azure More Tightly On HPC And AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

The Shape Of Supermicro Machine Learning Iron To Come

If it isn’t obvious, we like hardware here at The Next Platform. …

The Shape Of Supermicro Machine Learning Iron To Come was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

The Graph Database Poised To Pounce On The Mainstream

Perhaps the most important decision that any company will ever make is how they intend to structure and store the information they will preserve to encapsulate the goods and services they provide to their customers. …

The Graph Database Poised To Pounce On The Mainstream was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

HPC And AI Can’t Compute Without Fast, Scalable Storage

By definition, HPC is always at the cutting edge of computing, driving innovations in processor, system, and software design that eventually find their way into more mainstream computing systems. …

HPC And AI Can’t Compute Without Fast, Scalable Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Arm Upstart Ampere Starts Chipping Away At Intel Xeons

When this is all done, Intel might have wished it had kept Renee James as president and chief executive officer, because Ampere, an Arm server chip startup that James has been running since this spring, wants a big piece of the Xeon datacenter business and it has the financial backing to start a price war that others can win and only Intel can lose. …

Arm Upstart Ampere Starts Chipping Away At Intel Xeons was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

The Microserver, Redux And Reconsidered

If there is one rule of computing, is that it gets increasingly more expensive and more difficult to scale up performance within a single device or a single server node. …

The Microserver, Redux And Reconsidered was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .