The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra

At the end of July, Oak Ridge National Laboratories started receiving the first racks of servers that will eventually be expanded to become the “Summit” supercomputer, the long-awaited replacement to the “Titan” hybrid CPU-GPU system that was built by Cray and installed back in the fall of 2012. So, technically speaking, IBM has begun shipping its Power9-based “Witherspoon” system, the kicker to the Power8-based “Minksy” machine that Big Blue unveiled in September 2016 as a precursor and a testbed for the Power9 iron.

Given that IBM is shipping Summit nodes to Oak Ridge and has also started shipping similar (but …

The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Is M8 The Last Hurrah For Oracle Sparc?

Intel is not the only system maker that is looking to converge its processor lines to make life a bit simpler for itself and for its customers as well as to save some money on engineering work. Oracle has just announced its Sparc M8 processor, and while this is an interesting chip, what is also interesting is that a Sparc T8 companion processor aimed at entry and midrange systems was not already introduced and does not appear to be in the works.

There is plenty a little weird here. The new Sparc T8 systems are, in fact, going to be …

Is M8 The Last Hurrah For Oracle Sparc? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A Rare Peek Inside A 400G Cisco Network Chip

Server processor architectures are trying to break the ties between memory and compute to allow the capacities of each to scale independently of each other, but switching and routing giant Cisco Systems has already done this for a high-end switch chip that looks remarkably like a CPU tuned for network processing.

At the recent Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley, Jamie Markevitch, a principal engineer at Cisco showed off the guts of an unnamed but currently shipping network processor, something that happens very rarely in the switching and routing racket. With the exception of the upstarts like Barefoot Networks with …

A Rare Peek Inside A 400G Cisco Network Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Custom Server Makers Set The Datacenter Pace

Makers of tightly coupled, shared memory machines can make all of the arguments they want about how it is much more efficient and easier to program these NUMA machines than it is to do distributed computing across a cluster of more loosely coupled boxes, but for the most part, the IT market doesn’t care.

Distributed computing, in its more modern implementation of frameworks running on virtual machines or containers – or both – is by far the norm, both in the datacenter and on the public clouds. You don’t have to look any further than the latest server sales statistics …

Custom Server Makers Set The Datacenter Pace was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Signposts On The Roadmap Out To 10 Tb/sec Ethernet

The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. While 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was launched in 2010 and saw a fair amount of uptake amongst telecom suppliers for their backbones, the hyperscalers decided, quite correctly, that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was too expensive and opted for 40 Gb/sec instead.

Now, we are sitting on the cusp of the real 100 Gb/sec Ethernet rollout among hyperscalers and enterprise …

Signposts On The Roadmap Out To 10 Tb/sec Ethernet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mesos Borgs Google’s Kubernetes Right Back

The rivalry between Mesos, Kubernetes, and OpenStack just keeps getting more interesting, and instead of a winner take all situation, it has become more of a take what you need approach. That said, it is looking like Kubernetes is emerging as the de facto standard for container control, even though Google not the first out of the gate in open sourcing Kubernetes and Docker Swam and the full Docker Enterprise are seeing plenty of momentum in the enterprise.

Choice is a good thing for the IT industry, and the good news is that because of architectural choices made by …

Mesos Borgs Google’s Kubernetes Right Back was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Prospects For A Leaner And Meaner HPE

The era of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s envious – and expensive – desire to become IT software and services behemoth like the IBM of the 1990s and 2000s is coming to a close.

The company has finalized its spinout-merger of substantially all of its software assets to Micro Focus. HPE has already spun out the lion’s share of its outsourcing and consulting businesses to Computer Sciences and even earlier had split from its troublesome PC and very profitable printer businesses. These were spun out together to give the combined HP Inc a chance to live on Wall Street and because PCs …

The Prospects For A Leaner And Meaner HPE was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric

It is difficult not to be impatient for the technologies of the future, which is one reason that this publication is called The Next Platform. But those who are waiting for the Gen-Z consortium to deliver a memory fabric that will break the hegemony of the CPU in controlling access to memory and to deepen the memory hierarchy while at the same time flattening memory addressability are going to have to wait a little longer.

About a year longer, in fact, which is a bit further away than the founders of the Gen-Z consortium were hoping when they launched …

Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging For Skylake Xeons

There is no question that Intel has reached its peak in the datacenter when it comes to compute. For years now, it has had very little direct competition and only some indirect competition for the few remaining RISC upstarts and the threat of the newbies with their ARM architectures.

The question now, as we ponder the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors and their “Purley” platform that launched in July, is this: Is Intel at a local maximum, with another peak off in the distance, perhaps after a decline or perhaps after steady growth or a flat spot, or is this the …

The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging For Skylake Xeons was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Kafka Wakes Up And Is Metamorphosed Into A Database

Sometimes a database is like a collection of wax tablets that you can stack and sort through to update, and these days, sometimes it is more like a river that has a shape defined by its geography but it is constantly changing and flowing and that flow, more than anything else, defines the information that drives the business. There is no time to persist it, organize it, and then query it.

In this case, embedding a database right in that stream makes good sense, and that is precisely what Confluent, the company that has commercialized Apache Kafka, which is a …

Kafka Wakes Up And Is Metamorphosed Into A Database was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

VMware’s Platform Revolves Around ESXi, Except Where It Can’t

Building a platform is hard enough, and there are very few companies that can build something that scales, supports a diversity of applications, and, in the case of either cloud providers or software or whole system sellers, can be suitable for tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands or millions, of customers.

But if building a platform is hard, keeping it relevant is even harder, and those companies who demonstrate the ability to adapt quickly and to move to new ground while holding old ground are the ones that get to make money and wield influence in the datacenter. …

VMware’s Platform Revolves Around ESXi, Except Where It Can’t was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Rise Of The Fourth Wave Of Computing

According to a recent Jefferies report, the fourth wave of computing has started and it is being driven by the adoption of IoT with parallel processing as the solution. Tectonic shifts in computing have been caused by major forces dating back to the 1960s.

With each shift, new solution providers have emerged as prominent suppliers. The latest power often cited with the fourth wave is Nvidia and its parallel processing platform for HPC and artificial intelligence (AI), namely GPUs and the CUDA programming platform. The growth of the data center segment of Nvidia’s business – from $339 million in …

The Rise Of The Fourth Wave Of Computing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Drilling Into Microsoft’s BrainWave Soft Deep Learning Chip

There are a lot of different ways to skin the deep learning cat. But for hyperscalers and cloud providers who want to use a single platform internally as well as providing deep learning services to customers externally, they really want to have as few different architectures as possible in their datacenters to maximize efficiencies and to lower both capital and operational costs. This is particularly true when the hyperscaler is also a cloud provider.

If Moore’s Law had not run out of gas – or at least shifted to lower octane fuel – then the choice would have been easy. …

Drilling Into Microsoft’s BrainWave Soft Deep Learning Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

ARM Servers: Qualcomm Is Now A Contender

Many have tried to wrench the door of the datacenter open with ARM processors, but Qualcomm, which knows a thing or two about creating and selling chips for smartphones and other client devices, has perhaps the best chance of actually selling ARM chips in volume inside of servers.

The combination of a rich and eager target market with a good product design tailored for that market and enough financial strength and stability to ensure many generations of development are what are necessary to break into the datacenter, and the “Falkor” cores that were unveiled this week at Hot Chips were …

ARM Servers: Qualcomm Is Now A Contender was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Streamlining Medical Research With Machine Learning

In this fast-paced global economy, enhanced speed, productivity, and intelligence are more important than ever to success. Machines are now being leveraged to augment human capabilities in order to drive business growth or accelerate innovation. Businesses need leading-edge IT to achieve superhuman levels of performance.

Today’s enterprises and organizations are deploying high performance computing (HPC) technologies to reach the new frontier of IT intelligence. Backed by HPC solutions, users can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools to predict and solve problems in real time, streamline IT operations, and drive more informed, data-driven decision-making.

Utilizing Innovative AI Tools

Machine learning, …

Streamlining Medical Research With Machine Learning was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How To Do Stateless Compute, Clustered Storage Like A Hyperscaler

There are so many companies that claim that their storage systems are inspired by those that have been created by the hyperscalers – particularly Google and Facebook – that it is hard to keep track of them all.

But if we had to guess, and we do because the search engine giant has never revealed the nitty gritty on the hardware architecture and software stack underpinning its storage, we would venture that the foundation of the current Google File System and its Colossus successor looks a lot like what storage upstart Datrium has finally, after many years of development, brought …

How To Do Stateless Compute, Clustered Storage Like A Hyperscaler was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Where Serverless And Event Driven Computing Collide

Every new paradigm of computing has its own framework, and it is the adoption of that framework that usually makes it consumable for the regular enterprises that don’t have fleets of PhDs on hand to create their own frameworks before a technology is mature.

Serverless computing – something that strikes fear in the hearts of many whose living is dependent on the vast inefficiencies that still lurk in the datacenter – and event-driven computing are two different and often associated technologies where the frameworks are still evolving.

The serverless movement, which we have discussed before in analyzing the Lambda efforts …

Where Serverless And Event Driven Computing Collide was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come

One of the reasons that the University of California at Berkeley was been a hotbed of software technology back in the 1970s and 1980s is Michael Stonebraker, who was one of the pioneers in relational database technology and one of the industry’s biggest – and most vocal – shakers and movers and one of its most prolific serial entrepreneurs.

Like other database pioneers, Stonebraker read the early relational data model papers by IBMer Edgar Codd, and in 1973 started work on the Ingres database along IBM’s own System R database, which eventually became DB2, and Oracle’s eponymous database, which entered …

How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Ironic – And Fleeting – Volatility In NVM Storage

There is no question any longer that flash memory has found its place – in fact, many places – in the datacenter, even though the debate is still raging about when or if solid state memory will eventually replace disk drives in all datacenters of the world.

Sometime between tomorrow and never is a good guess.

Flash is still a hot commodity, so much so that the slower-than-expected transition to 3D NAND has caused a shortage in supply that is driving up the price of enterprise-grade flash – unfortunately at the same time that memory makers are having trouble cranking …

The Ironic – And Fleeting – Volatility In NVM Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets

In a properly working capitalist economy, innovative companies make big bets, help create new markets, vanquish competition or at least hold it at bay, and profit from all of the hard work, cleverness, luck, and deal making that comes with supplying a good or service to demanding customers.

There is no question that Nvidia has become a textbook example of this as it helped create and is now benefitting from the wave of accelerated computing that is crashing into the datacenters of the world. The company is on a roll, and is on the very laser-sharp cutting edge of its …

Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.