Datacenter 25G Ethernet Upgrade Wave Lifts Mellanox

Having multiple related but distinct product lines turns a company into an economic engine that runs a lot smoother than an it would run with a single cylinder. …

Datacenter 25G Ethernet Upgrade Wave Lifts Mellanox was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Delivering On The Promise Of Network Function Virtualization

People have been talking about software defined networking and its related network function virtualization for so long that it must appear to many organizations that everyone else is doing it. …

Delivering On The Promise Of Network Function Virtualization was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Cray Slingshots Back Into HPC Interconnects With Shasta Systems

While processors and now GPUs tend to get all of the glory when it comes to high performance computing, for the past three decades as distributed computing architectures became the norm in supercomputing, it has been the interconnects that made all the difference in how well – or poorly – these systems perform. …

Cray Slingshots Back Into HPC Interconnects With Shasta Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Berkeley Lab First In Line for Cray “Shasta” Supercomputers

For the past five years, supercomputer maker Cray has been diligently at work not only creating a new system architecture that allows for a mix of different interconnects and compute for its future “Shasta” systems, but has also brought long-time Cray chief technology officer, Steve Scott, back into the company after two stints spent at Nvidia and Google to create a new interconnect, called “Slingshot,” that is the beating heart of the Shasta system and that signals a return of the Cray that we know and love. …

Berkeley Lab First In Line for Cray “Shasta” Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Big Blue Dons A $34 Billion Red Hat

In one fell swoop that is going to cost Big Blue a whopping $34 billion, IBM is going to become a modern software powerhouse in the datacenter that has to be contended with in an entirely different way. …

Big Blue Dons A $34 Billion Red Hat was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Intel’s Data Center Group Rides A Wave Of Compute Demand

Sometimes, you just have to be amazed by a good stroke of luck in the IT sector. …

Intel’s Data Center Group Rides A Wave Of Compute Demand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

AMD Inches Up Server Share On The Way To Rome

IT shops are notorious when it comes to avoiding risk, and this is something that we should be grateful for because it increases the odds that this increasingly compute-dependent world keeps working. …

AMD Inches Up Server Share On The Way To Rome was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

The 400G Ethernet Ramp About Radix As Much As Bandwidth

The appetite for network bandwidth is insatiable, as is that of compute and storage, but our enthusiasm to acquire larger and larger chunks of all of these things is curtailed significantly by cost. …

The 400G Ethernet Ramp About Radix As Much As Bandwidth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Great Lakes Super To Remove Islands Of Compute

It is hard to say for sure, but there is probably as much aggregate computing capacity in the academic supercomputing centers of the world as there are in the big national labs. …

Great Lakes Super To Remove Islands Of Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

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 .