Turbulence – And Opportunity – Ahead In The Oracle Sparc Base

You can’t swing a good-sized cat without hitting an enterprise running Oracle software in some shape or form. If it’s not Oracle’s ubiquitous database, then it’s one of its middleware platforms or its enterprise applications in the Fusion suite or its predecessors in the Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards suites.

Currently Oracle boasts 430,000 customers running its software – that’s quite an installed base. And it’s all teed up to become quite a battleground. Why?

Six months or so ago, news broke that Oracle was laying off a large number of hardware folks. Something like 2,500 Sparc and Solaris …

Turbulence – And Opportunity – Ahead In The Oracle Sparc Base was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Argonne Hints at Future Architecture of Aurora Exascale System

There are two supercomputers named “Aurora” that are affiliated with Argonne National Laboratory – the one that was supposed to be built this year and the one that for a short time last year was known as “A21,” that will be built in 2021, and that will be the first exascale system built in the United States.

Details have just emerged on the second, and now only important, Aurora system, thanks to Argonne opening up proposals for the early science program that lets researchers put code on the supercomputer for three months before it starts its production work. The proposal …

Argonne Hints at Future Architecture of Aurora Exascale System was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How Spectre And Meltdown Mitigation Hits Xeon Performance

It has been more than two months since Google revealed its research on the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities in modern processors, and caused the whole IT industry to slam on the brakes and brace for the impact. The initial microbenchmark results on the mitigations for these security holes, put out by Red Hat, showed the impact could be quite dramatic. But according to recent tests done by Intel, the impact is not as bad as one might think in many cases. In other cases, the impact is quite severe.

The Next Platform has gotten its hands on …

How Spectre And Meltdown Mitigation Hits Xeon Performance was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Getting AI Leverage With GPU-Optimized Systems

The artificial intelligence revolution is quickly changing every industry, and modern data centers must be equipped to capitalize on these extraordinary new capabilities. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Nvidia are partnering to bring best-of-breed AI solutions to every customer, offering AI-integrated systems, services, and support capabilities to help all organizations seamlessly optimize their AI foundation, deliver differentiated outcomes, and gain competitive advantage.

High performance computing has become key to solving many of the world’s grand challenges in the realms of science, industry, and engineering. However, traditional CPUs are increasingly failing to deliver the performance gains they used to, and the …

Getting AI Leverage With GPU-Optimized Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

FPGA Interconnect Boosted In Concert With Compute

To keep their niche in computing, field programmable gate arrays not only need to stay on the cutting edge of chip manufacturing processes. They also have to include the most advanced networking to balance out that compute, rivalling that which the makers of switch ASICs provide in their chips.

By comparison, CPUs have it easy. They don’t have the serializer/deserializer (SerDes) circuits that switch chips have as the foundation of their switch fabric. Rather, they might have a couple of integrated Ethernet network interface controllers embedded on the die, maybe running at 1 Gb/sec or 10 Gb/sec, and they offload …

FPGA Interconnect Boosted In Concert With Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why Cisco Should – And Should Not – Acquire Pure Storage

Flash memory has become absolutely normal in the datacenter, but that does not mean it is ubiquitous and it most certainly does not mean that all flash arrays, whether homegrown and embedded in servers or purchased as appliances, are created equal. They are not, and you can tell not only from the feeds and speeds, but from the dollars and sense.

It has been nine years since Pure Storage, one of the original flash array upstarts, was founded and seven years since the company dropped out of stealth with its first generation of FlashArray products. In that relatively short time, …

Why Cisco Should – And Should Not – Acquire Pure Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends

Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. While these elements affect each other, they are still largely standalone realms, with their own specialized devices and suppliers. And so it is important to know the trends in the technologies.

Until fairly recently, the box counters like IDC and Gartner have been pretty secretive about the data they have about the networking business. But IDC has been gradually giving a little more flavor than just saying Cisco …

Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Weaving A Streaming Stack Like Twitter And Yahoo

The hyperscalers of the world have to deal with dataset sizes – both streaming and at rest – and real-time processing requirements that put them into an entirely different class of computing.

They are constantly inventing and reinventing what they do in compute, storage, and networking not just because they enjoy the intellectual challenge, but because they have swelling customer bases that hammer on their systems so hard they can break them.

This is one of the reasons why an upstart called Streamlio has created a new event-driven platform that is based the work of software engineers at Twitter, Yahoo, …

Weaving A Streaming Stack Like Twitter And Yahoo was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Roadmap Ahead For Exascale HPC In The US

The first step in rolling out a massive supercomputer installed at a government sponsored HPC laboratory is to figure out when you want to get it installed and doing useful work. The second is consider the different technologies that will be available to reach performance and power envelope goals. And the third is to give it a cool name.

Last but not least is to put a stake in the ground by telling the world about the name of the supercomputer and its rough timing, thereby confirming. These being publicly funded machines, this is only right.

As of today, it’s …

The Roadmap Ahead For Exascale HPC In The US was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Tesla GPU Accelerator Bang For The Buck, Kepler To Volta

If you are running applications in the HPC or AI realms, you might be in for some sticker shock when you shop for GPU accelerators – thanks in part to the growing demand of Nvidia’s Tesla cards in those markets but also because cryptocurrency miners who can’t afford to etch their own ASICs are creating a huge demand for the company’s top-end GPUs.

Nvidia does not provide list prices or suggested street prices for its Tesla line of GPU accelerator cards, so it is somewhat more problematic to try to get a handle on the bang for the buck over …

Tesla GPU Accelerator Bang For The Buck, Kepler To Volta was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Server Market Booms, And It Could Last For A While

The general consensus, for as long as anyone can remember, is that there is an insatiable appetite for compute in the datacenter. Were it not for the constraints of budgets, for both the acquisition of iron, the facilities to house it, the electricity to power and cool it, and the people to manage it, it is safe to say that the installed base of servers worldwide would be much larger than it is.

But the world doesn’t work that way, and there are constraints. But thanks to ever more complex applications, ever richer media, and a burning desire to save …

The Server Market Booms, And It Could Last For A While was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

OpenStack Stretches To The Edge, Embraces Accelerators

Since its inception, the OpenStack cloud controller co-created by NASA and Rackspace Hosting, with these respective organizations supplying the core Nova compute and Swift object storage foundations, has been focused on the datacenter. But as the “Queens” release of OpenStack is being made available, the open source community that controls that cloud controller is being pulled out of the datacenter and out to the edge, where a minimalist variant of the software is expected to have a major presence in managing edge computing devices.

The Queens release of OpenStack is the 17th drop of software since NASA and Rackspace first …

OpenStack Stretches To The Edge, Embraces Accelerators was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Engine Of HPC And Machine Learning

There is no question right now that if you have a big computing job in either high performance computing – the colloquial name for traditional massively parallel simulation and modeling applications – or in machine learning – the set of statistical analysis routines with feedback loops that can do identification and transformation tasks that used to be solely the realm of humans – then an Nvidia GPU accelerator is the engine of choice to run that work at the best efficiency.

It is usually difficult to make such clean proclamations in the IT industry, with so many different kinds of …

The Engine Of HPC And Machine Learning was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The New HPE Sheriff Lays Down The Hybrid IT Law

There is a new sheriff in town at Hewlett Packard Enterprise – that would be chief executive officer Antonio Neri – and that means a new way of looking at the books and therefore steering the business. No, we didn’t mean that the other way around.

In opening up its books for the first quarter of its fiscal 2018 year, which ended in January, we can see some important things about HPE’s business, and at the same time, we have lost some visibility about core parts of its business.

First of all, the books have been reclassified significantly in the …

The New HPE Sheriff Lays Down The Hybrid IT Law was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Bringing GPUs To Bear On Big Standard Relational Databases

Among all of the hardware and software that is in a datacenter, the database – whether it is SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL or some other contraption in which to pour data and ask questions about it –  is probably the stickiest. Companies can and do change server, storage, or networking hardware, and they change operating systems and even applications, but they are loath to mess with repository of the information that is used to run the company.

This is understandably so, given the risk of inadvertently altering or losing that vital data. Ironically, this is one reason why databases proliferate at …

Bringing GPUs To Bear On Big Standard Relational Databases was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AMD Gets Zen About The Edge

If there is one thing that can be said about modern distributed computing that has held true for three decades now, it is that the closer you get to the core of the datacenter, the beefier the compute tends to be. Conversely, as computing gets pushed to the edge, it gets lighter by the necessity of using little power and delivering just enough performance to accomplish whatever data crunching is necessary outside of the datacenter.

While we have focused on the compute in the traditional datacenter since founding The Next Platform three years ago, occasionally dabbling in the microserver arena …

AMD Gets Zen About The Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Road To 400G Ethernet Is Paved With Bechtolsheim’s Intentions

The best way to make a wave is to make a big splash, which is something that Andy Bechtolsheim, perhaps the most famous serial entrepreneur in IT infrastructure, is very good at doing. As one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and a slew of networking and system startups as well as the first investor in Google, he doesn’t just see waves, but generates them and then surfs on them, creating companies and markets as he goes along.

Bechtolsheim was a PhD student at Stanford University, working on a project that aimed to integrate networking interfaces with processors when he …

The Road To 400G Ethernet Is Paved With Bechtolsheim’s Intentions was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pushed To The Edge

Computing, which always includes storage and networking, evolves. Just like everything else on Earth. Anything with a benefit in efficiency will always find its niche, and it will change to plug into new niches as they arise and make use of ever-cheaper technologies as they advance from the edges.

It is with this in mind that we ponder the datacenter. As in the center of data, which has been expanding and thinning for a very long time now, and which is pushing itself – and us – to the edge. What, we wonder, is a datacenter that doesn’t have …

Pushed To The Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Supercomputing At The Crossroads

The supercomputing business, the upper stratosphere of the much broader high performance computing segment of the IT industry, is without question one of the most exciting areas in data processing and visualization.

It is also one of the most frustrating sectors in which to try to make a profitable living. The customers are the most demanding, the applications are the most complex, the budget pressures are intense, the technical challenges are daunting, the governments behind major efforts can be capricious, and the competition is fierce.

This is the world where Cray, which literally invented the supercomputing field, and its competitors …

Supercomputing At The Crossroads was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Ins And Outs Of IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems

It has taken nearly four years for the low end, workhorse machines in IBM’s Power Systems line to be updated, and the long awaited Power9 processors and the shiny new “ZZ” systems have been unveiled. We have learned quite a bit about these machines, many of which are not really intended for the kinds of IT organizations that The Next Platform is focused on. But several of the machines are aimed at large enterprises, service providers, and even cloud builders who want something with a little more oomph on a lot of fronts than an X86 server can deliver in …

The Ins And Outs Of IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.