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.

Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster

When it comes to machine learning training, people tend to focus on the compute. We always want to know if the training is being done on specialized parallel X86 devices, like Intel’s Xeon Phi, or on massively parallel GPU devices, like Nvidia’s “Pascal” and “Volta” accelerators, or even on custom devices from the likes of Nervana Systems (now part of Intel), Wave Systems, Graphcore, Google, or Fujitsu.

But as is the case with other kinds of high performance computing, the network matters when it comes to machine learning, and it can be the differentiating …

Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A First Look At IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems

The HPC crowd got a little taste of the IBM’s “Nimbus” Power9 processors for scale out systems, juiced by Nvidia “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators, last December with the Power AC922 system that is the basis of the “Summit” and “Sierra” pre-exascale supercomputers being built by Big Blue for the US Department of Energy.

Now, IBM’s enterprise customers that use more standard iron in their clusters, and who predominantly have CPU-only setups rather than adding in GPUs or FPGAs and who need a lot more local storage, are getting more of a Power9 meal with the launch of six new machines …

A First Look At IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Just How Large Can Nvidia’s Datacenter Business Grow?

The combination of the excitement for new video games, the machine learning software revolution, the buildout of very large supercomputers based on hybrid CPU-GPU architectures, and the mining of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have combined into a quadruple whammy that is driving Nvidia to new heights for revenues, profits, and market capitalization. And thus it is no surprise Nvidia is one of the few companies that is bucking the trend in a very tough couple of weeks on Wall Street.

But having demand spiking for both its current “Volta” GPUs, which are currently aimed at HPC and AI compute, …

Just How Large Can Nvidia’s Datacenter Business Grow? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Different Server Workhorses For Different Workload Courses

Co-design is all the rage these days in systems design, where the hardware and software components of a system – whether it is aimed at compute, storage, or networking – are designed in tandem, not one after the other, and immediately affect how each aspect of a system are ultimate crafted. It is a smart idea that wrings the maximum amount of performance out of a system for very precise workloads.

The era of general purpose computing, which is on the wane, brought an ever-increasing amount of capacity to bear in the datacenter at an ever -lower cost, enabling an …

Different Server Workhorses For Different Workload Courses was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Sharpens The Edge With Skylake Xeon D

Compute is being embedded in everything, and there is another wave of distributed computing pushing out from the datacenter into all kinds of network, storage, and other kinds of devices that collect and process data in their own right as well as passing it back up to the glass house for final processing and permanent storage.

The computing requirements at the edge are different from the core compute in the datacenter, and it is very convenient indeed that they align nicely with some of the more modest processing needs of network devices, storage clusters, and more modest jobs in the …

Intel Sharpens The Edge With Skylake Xeon D was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM’s 2018 Rollout Plan For Power9 Systems

In a way, the processor market started moving in slow motion through 2017 as server makers and their customers were awaiting a veritable cornucopia of processor options, something the industry has not seen in many a year. We have been predicting that there would be a Cambrian Explosion of compute, first in 2017, but it has taken a bit longer for many of these processors to come to market and it looks like 2018 might be the year.

This might be, in fact, the year when IBM’s Power RISC processors see a long-awaited resurgence, and frankly, if it doesn’t happen …

IBM’s 2018 Rollout Plan For Power9 Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Private Equity Amps Up Arm Servers With Applied X86 Techies

The Carlyle Group, the publicly traded investment firm that has invested in nearly 300 companies that have a net worth of $170 billion and which itself could make around $4 billion in management fees and income from those investments for 2017, does not invest in any technology lightly.

So the fact that it has acquired the X Gene server processor assets that were created over many years by Applied Micro and briefly owned last year by Chinese IT supplier MACOM means that Carlyle believes Arm servers have a shot in the datacenter and that its investors want to get a …

Private Equity Amps Up Arm Servers With Applied X86 Techies was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Navigating The Revenue Streams And Profit Pools Of AWS

It will not happen for a long time, if ever, but we surely do wish that Amazon Web Services, the public cloud division of the online retailing giant, was a separate company. Because if AWS was a separate company, and it was a public company at that, it would have finer grained financial results that might give us some insight into exactly what more than 1 million customers are actually renting on the AWS cloud.

As it is, all that the Amazon parent tells Wall Street about its AWS offspring is the revenue stream and operating profit levels for each …

Navigating The Revenue Streams And Profit Pools Of AWS was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Prying The Lid Off Black Box Switch SDKs

It would be hard to find a business that has been more proprietary, insular, and secretive than the networking industry, and for good reasons. The sealed boxes that switch vendors sell, and that are the very backbone of the Internet, have been wickedly profitable – and in a way that neither servers nor storage have been.

There are so many control points in the networking stack that it is no wonder the hyperscalers and cloud builders have been leaning so heavily on switch ASIC vendors to open up their entire stack. The only reason they don’t build their own switch …

Prying The Lid Off Black Box Switch SDKs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Shakes Up Container Ecosystem With CoreOS Deal

The container craze on Linux platforms just took an interesting twist now that Red Hat is sheling out $250 million to acquire its upstart rival in Linux and containers, CoreOS.

As the largest and by far the most profitable open source software company in the world – it had $2.4 billion in sales in fiscal 2017, brought $253.7 million of that to the bottom line, and ended that fiscal year in February with a $2.7 billion subscription and services backlog – Red Hat has not been afraid to spend some money to get its hands on control of key open …

Red Hat Shakes Up Container Ecosystem With CoreOS Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Reckoning The Spectre And Meltdown Performance Hit For HPC

While no one has yet created an exploit to take advantage of the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities that were exposed by Google six months ago and that were revealed in early January, it is only a matter of time. The patching frenzy has not settled down yet, and a big concern is not just whether these patches fill the security gaps, but at what cost they do so in terms of application performance.

To try to ascertain the performance impact of the Spectre and Meltdown patches, most people have relied on comments from Google on the negligible …

Reckoning The Spectre And Meltdown Performance Hit For HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

For Many, Hyperconverged Is The Next Platform

There is a kind of dichotomy in the datacenter. The upstart hyperconverged storage makers will tell you that the server-storage half-bloods that they have created are inspired by the storage at Google or Facebook or Amazon Web Services, but this is not, strictly speaking, true.  Hyperscalers and cloud builders are creating completely disaggregated compute and storage, linked by vast Clos networks with incredible amounts of bandwidth. But enterprises, who operate on a much more modest scale, are increasingly adopting hyperconverged storage – which mixes compute and storage on the same virtualized clusters.

One camp is splitting up servers and storage, …

For Many, Hyperconverged Is The Next Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel’s Glass House Is Definitely More Than Half Full

An unexpected jump in enterprise spending coupled with the ongoing heavy spending by hyperscalers, cloud builders, and communications companies revamping their networks of gear coupled with the ramp of the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors launched last July gave Intel the best overall quarter in its history, gauged by revenues and profits, and the best one also that its Data Center Group has ever posted.

Many are wondering if this boom can last. Intel’s top brass are not among them, but they do concede that the fourth quarter of 2017 was an unusually good one. It is hard to see if …

Intel’s Glass House Is Definitely More Than Half Full was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It’s About Time For Time Series Databases

To get straight to the point: nobody wants to have large grain snapshots of data for any dataset that is actually comprised of a continuous stream of data points. With the data storage and stream processing now so cost-effective (relatively speaking, of course) that anybody can do it – not just national security agencies or hedge funds and brokerages with big budgets – there is pent up demand for a SQL-friendly time series database.

So that is what the founders of Timescale set out to create. And while they are by no means alone in this market, the open source …

It’s About Time For Time Series Databases was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Energy Giant Eni Starts Investing In Supercomputers Again

Energy is not free, not even to energy companies, and so they are just as concerned with being efficient with their supercomputers as the most penny pinching hyperscaler or cloud builder where the computing is the product.

Like the other major oil and gas producers on Earth, the last few years have not been easy ones for Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the Italian energy major that employs 33,000 people and operates in 76 countries worldwide and now has the distinction of having the most powerful supercomputer in the energy sector – and indeed, among all kinds of commercial entities in the …

Energy Giant Eni Starts Investing In Supercomputers Again was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.