The Booming Server Market In The Wake Of Skylake

The slowdown in server sales ahead of Intel’s July launch of the “Skylake” Xeon SP was real, and if the figures from the third quarter of this year are any guide, then it looks like that slump is over. Plenty of customers wanted the shiny new Skylake gear, and we think a fair number of them also wanted to buy older-generation “Broadwell” Xeons and the “Grantley” server platform given the premium that Intel is charging for Skylake processors and their “Purley” platform.

Server makers with older Broadwell machinery in the barn were no doubt happy to oblige customers and clear …

The Booming Server Market In The Wake Of Skylake was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Inside Nvidia’s Next-Gen Saturn V AI Cluster

Generally speaking, the world’s largest chip makers have been pretty secretive about the giant supercomputers they use to design and test their devices, although occasionally, Intel and AMD have provided some insight into their clusters.

We have no idea what kind of resources Nvidia has for its EDA systems – we are trying to get some insight into that – but we do know that it has just upgraded a very powerful supercomputer to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence that is also doing double duty on some aspects of its chip design business.

As part of …

Inside Nvidia’s Next-Gen Saturn V AI Cluster was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Redemption Of NFS

If thinking of NFS v4 puts a bad taste in your mouth, you are not alone. Or wrong. NFS v4.0 and v4.1 have had some valid, well-documented growing pains that include limited bandwidth and scalability. These issues were a result of a failure to properly address performance issues in the v4.0 release.

File systems are the framework upon which the entire house is built, so these performance issues were not trivial problems for us in IT. Thanks to the dedication of the NFS developer community, NFS v4.2 solves the problems of v4.0 and v4.1 and also introduces a host of …

The Redemption Of NFS was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Battle Of The InfiniBands

When it comes to HPC, compute is like the singers in a rock band, making all of the noise and soaking up most of the attention. But the network that lashes the compute together is literally the beat of the drums and the thump of the bass that keeps everything in synch and allows for the harmonies of the singers to come together at all.

In this analogy, it is not clear what HPC storage is. It might be the van that moves the instruments from town to town, plus the roadies who live in the van that set up …

The Battle Of The InfiniBands was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Ecosystem Expands For AMD Epyc Servers

The “Naples” Epyc server processors do not exactly present a new architecture from a new processor maker, but given the difficulties that AMD had at the tail end of the Opteron line a decade ago and its long dormancy in the server space, it is almost like AMD had to start back at the beginning to gain the trust of potential server buyers.

Luckily for AMD, and its Arm server competitors Qualcomm and Cavium, there is intense pressure from all aspects of high-end computing – internal applications and external ones at hyperscalers and some cloud builders as well as enterprises …

The Ecosystem Expands For AMD Epyc Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Stacks Up Xeons Against AMD Epyc Systems

Apparently, it’s Rivalry Week in the compute section of the datacenter here at The Next Platform. There are a slew of vendors ramping up their processors and their ecosystems to do battle for 2018 budget dollars, and many of them are talking up the performance and bang for the buck of their architectures.

We have just discussed the “Vulcan” variant of the ThunderX2 processor from Cavium and how that company thinks it ranks against the new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel, which made their debut in July. AMD was talking up its Epyc processors at the recent SC17 …

Intel Stacks Up Xeons Against AMD Epyc Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cavium Is Truly A Contender With One-Two Arm Server Punch

It has been two years since chip maker Cavium rolled out its ThunderX Arm server processor roadmap and gave us the first glimpse of its second-generation ThunderX2 processors. A lot has changed in that time, and Cavium is now sitting in the cat-bird seat of the Arm server market at just the moment that it is merging with rival chipmaker Marvell.

Timing is everything in this IT racket, and Cavium certainly has been fortunate in this regard.

Thanks largely to Avago Technologies buying Broadcom in May 2015 for a stunning $37 billion and then at the end of 2016 losing …

Cavium Is Truly A Contender With One-Two Arm Server Punch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mainstreaming HPC Codes Will Drive The Next GPU Wave

All the shiny and zippy hardware in the world is meaningless without software, and that software can only go mainstream if it is easy to use. It has taken Linux two decades to get enterprise features and polish, and Windows Server took as long, too. So did a raft of open source middleware applications for storing data and interfacing back-end databases and datastores with Web front ends.

Now, it is time for HPC and AI applications, and hopefully, it won’t take this long.

As readers of The Next Platform know full well, HPC applications are not new. In fact, they …

Mainstreaming HPC Codes Will Drive The Next GPU Wave was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A Deep Dive Into NEC’s Aurora Vector Engine

We caught wind of the “Aurora” Vector Engine vector processor and the “Tsubasa” system from NEC that makes use of it ahead of the SC17 supercomputer conference, and revealed everything we could find out about the system and speculated a bit about how the underlying processor in the absence of real data. At the conference in Denver, NEC formally unveiled the Tsubasa system and its vector motors, and now we can tell you a bit more about them and how NEC stacks them up against CPUs and GPUs when it comes to floating point work.

Just to be consistent with …

A Deep Dive Into NEC’s Aurora Vector Engine was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Marvell And Cavium Forge A Datacenter Platform

It has taken what seems like forever, but Arm server processors are starting to get some legs just as a massive consolidation wave, driven as much by the end of Moore’s Law as by the desire to always be bigger, is undertaking the semiconductor industry. All we need is a recession and a price war in the datacenter and a lot of compute, storage, and networking incumbents could be toppled. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it will not be the last.

This is why semiconductor giant Broadcom wants to pay a stunning $130 billion to acquire sometime rival …

Marvell And Cavium Forge A Datacenter Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Key Software Firms Reengineer Their Code With OpenACC

Academic centers and government agencies often design and write their own applications, but some of them and the vast majority of enterprise customers with HPC applications usually depend on third parties for their software. They also depend upon those software developers to continually enhance and scale those applications, and that means adding support for GPU accelerators. Two important ones, Gaussian and ANSYS, depend not only on GPUs, but the OpenACC programming model, to extend across more cores and therefore do more work faster.

Let’s start with Gaussian.

The way that chemicals react can be the difference between a product success …

Key Software Firms Reengineer Their Code With OpenACC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC Revenues Under Pressure, But Outlook Optimistic

The market for high performance computing can be a capricious one in any short term, but in general has been growing and, at last according to some of the experts who have spent decades tracking it, is set to grow a little bit faster than the IT sector at large in the coming years.

A lot, of course, will depend on whether or not the United States, Europe, China, and Japan come through with what are expected to be substantial investments in pre-exascale and exascale systems in the next few years, and quite possibly resulting in a bumper crop of …

HPC Revenues Under Pressure, But Outlook Optimistic was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mitigating Cybersecurity Threats With Advanced Datacenter Tech

In this fast-paced global economy, enterprises must innovate to evolve and succeed. Today’s industry experts are seeking transformative technologies – like high performance computing and artificial intelligence ­– to help them accelerate data analytics, support increasingly complex workloads, and facilitate business growth to meet the challenges of tomorrow. However, data security remains a chief concern as enterprises race to implement these cutting-edge innovations.

The digital age is marked by several key trends – in cluding IT modernization, business transformation, and digital disruptions such as proliferating mobility, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and much more. Many businesses are investing heavily …

Mitigating Cybersecurity Threats With Advanced Datacenter Tech was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The TOP500 is Dead, Long Live The TOP500

Twice a year, the TOP500 project publishes a list of the 500 most powerful computer systems, aka supercomputers. The TOP500 list is widely considered to be HPC-related, and many analyze the list statistics to understand the HPC market and technology trends. As the rules of the list do not preclude non-HPC systems to be submitted and listed, various OEMs have regularly submitted non-HPC platforms to the list in order to improve their apparent market position in the HPC arena. Thus, the task of analyzing the list for HPC markets and trends has grown more complicated.

In 2007, I published an …

The TOP500 is Dead, Long Live The TOP500 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mellanox Poised For HDR InfiniBand Quantum Leap

InfiniBand and Ethernet are in a game of tug of war and are pushing the bandwidth and price/performance envelopes constantly. But the one thing they cannot do is get too far out ahead of the PCI-Express bus through which network interface cards hook into processors. The 100 Gb/sec links commonly used in Ethernet and InfiniBand server adapters run up against bandwidth ceilings with two ports running on PCI-Express 3.0 slots, and it is safe to say that 200 Gb/sec speeds will really need PCI-Express 4.0 slots to have two ports share a slot.

This, more than any other factor, is …

Mellanox Poised For HDR InfiniBand Quantum Leap was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings Losing Accuracy Despite High Precision

If the hyperscalers have taught us anything, it is that more data is always better. And because of this, we have to start out by saying that we are grateful to the researchers who created and administer the Top 500 supercomputer benchmark tests for the past 25 years, creating an astonishing 50 consecutive lists ranking the most powerful machines in the world as gauged by the double precision Linpack Fortran parallel matrix math test.

This set of data stands out among a few other groups of benchmarks that have been used by the tens of thousands of organizations – academic …

Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings Losing Accuracy Despite High Precision was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Breaks $2 Billion Datacenter Run Rate

If GPU acceleration had not been conceived of by academics and researchers at companies like Nvidia more than a decade ago, how much richer would Intel be today? How many more datacenters would have had to be expanded or built? Would HPC have stretched to try to reach exascale, and would machine learning have fulfilled the long-sought promise of artificial intelligence, or at least something that looks like it?

These are big questions, and relevant ones, as Nvidia’s datacenter business has just broken through the $2 billion run rate barrier. With something on the order of a 10X speedup across …

Nvidia Breaks $2 Billion Datacenter Run Rate was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC Heavyweight Goes All-In On OpenACC

Across the HPC community, commercial firms, government labs and academic institutions are adapting their code to embrace GPU architectures. They are motivated by the faster performance and lower energy consumption provided by GPUs, and many of them are using OpenACC to annotate their code and make it GPU-friendly. The Next Platform recently interviewed one key organization to learn why it is using the OpenACC programming model to expand its computing capabilities and platform support.

If the earth was the size of a basketball, its atmosphere would be the thickness of shrink wrap. It is fragile enough that in 1960, the …

HPC Heavyweight Goes All-In On OpenACC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Qualcomm’s Amberwing Arm Server Chip Finally Takes Flight

It is going to be a busy week for chip maker Qualcomm as it formally jumps from smartphones to servers with its new “Amberwing” Centriq 2400 Arm server processor during the same week that it has received an unsolicited $130 billion takeover offer from sometimes rival chipmaker Broadcom.

The Centriq 2400 is the culmination of over four years of work and investment, which according to the experts in the semiconductor industry we have talked to, easily took on the order of $100 million to $125 million to make happen ­– remember there was a prototype as well as the …

Qualcomm’s Amberwing Arm Server Chip Finally Takes Flight was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Keeping OpenStack On The Edge, Bleeding And Otherwise

Nobody likes to talk about the scope and scale of platforms than we do at The Next Platform. Almost all of the interesting frameworks for various kinds of distributed computing are open source projects, but the lack of fit and finish is a common complaint across open source software projects.

As Mark Collier, chief operating officer at the OpenStack Foundation, puts it succinctly: “Open source doesn’t have an innovation problem. It has an integration problem.”

Collier’s chief concern, as well as that of his compatriot, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation and a former Racker ­– meaning …

Keeping OpenStack On The Edge, Bleeding And Otherwise was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.