Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays

There may be a shortage in the supply of DRAM main memory and NAND flash memory that is having an adverse effect on the server and storage markets, but there is no shortage of vendors who are trying to push the envelope on clustered storage using a mix of these memories and others such as the impending 3D XPoint.

Micron Technology, which makes and sells all three of these types of memories, is so impatient with the rate of technological advancement in clustered flash arrays based on the NVM-Express protocol that it decided to engineer and launch its own product …

Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Crunching Machine Learning And Databases Together On GPUs

While it is always best to have the right tool for the job, it is better still if a tool can be used by multiple jobs and therefore have its utilization be higher than it might otherwise be. This is one of the reasons why general purpose, X86-based computing took over the datacenter. Economies of scale trumped the efficiency that can come from limited scope or just leaving legacy applications alone in place on alternate platforms.

The idea of offloading computational tasks from CPUs to GPU accelerators took off in academia a little more than a decade ago, and …

Crunching Machine Learning And Databases Together On GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand

Enterprise spending on servers was a bit soft in the first quarter, as evidenced by the financial results posted by Intel and by its sometime rival IBM, but the hyperscale and HPC markets, at least when it comes to networking, was a bit soft, according to high-end network chip and equipment maker Mellanox Technologies.

In the first quarter ended March 31, Mellanox had a 4.1 percent revenue decline, to $188.7 million, and because of higher research and development costs, presumably associated with the rollout of 200 Gb/sec Quantum InfiniBand technology (which the company has talked about) and …

HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance

Energy efficiency and operating costs for systems are as important as raw performance in today’s datacenters. Everyone from the largest hyperscalers and high performance computing centers to large enterprises that are sometimes like them are trying squeeze as much performance as they can from their infrastructure while reining in power consumption and the costs associated with keeping it all from overheating.

Throw in the slowing down of Moore’s Law and new emerging workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the challenge to these organizations becomes apparent.

In response, organizations on the cutting edge have embraced accelerators like GPUs and …

Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Melds Xeon E5 And E7 With Skylake

We have been saying for the past two year that the impending “Skylake” Xeon processors represented the biggest platform architectural change in the Xeon processor business at Intel since the transformational “Nehalem” Xeon 5500s that debuted back in March 2009 into the gaping maw of the Great Recession.

There is no global recession breathing down the IT sector’s neck like a hungry wolf here in 2017, eight years and seven chip generations later. But Intel is facing competitive pressures from AMD’s Naples Opterons, IBM’s Power9, and the ARM collective (mainly Cavium and Qualcomm at this point, but Applied Micro is …

Intel Melds Xeon E5 And E7 With Skylake was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

OpenMP: From Parallel Loops To Exaflops

This fall will mark twenty years since the publication of the v1.0 specification of OpenMP Fortran. From early loop parallelism to a heterogeneous, exascale future, OpenMP has apparently weathered well the vicissitudes and tumultuous changes of the computer industry over that past two decades and appears to be positioned to address the needs of our exascale future.

In the 1990s when the OpenMP specification was first created, memory was faster than the processors that performed the computation. This is the exact opposite of today’s systems where memory is the key bottleneck and the HPC community is rapidly adopting faster memory …

OpenMP: From Parallel Loops To Exaflops was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Lessons Learned From Facebook’s Split Network Backbone

Distributed applications, whether they are containerized or not, have a lot of benefits when it comes to modularity and scale. But in a world of feature creep on all applications, whether they are internally facing ones running a business or hyperscale consumer applications like Google’s search engine or Facebook’s social media network, these distributed applications put a huge strain on the network.

This, more than any other factor, is why network costs are rising faster than any other aspect of the datacenter. Gone are the days when everything was done in three or four tiers, with a Web server like …

Lessons Learned From Facebook’s Split Network Backbone was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Datacenter Does Not Revolve Around AWS, Despite Its Gravity

If the public cloud computing market were our solar system, then Amazon Web Services would be Jupiter and Saturn together and the remaining five fast-growing big clouds would be like the inner planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,  and that pile of rocks that used to be a planet mixed up with those clouds that are finding growth a bit more challenging  – think Uranus and Neptune and maybe even Pluto if you still want to count it a planet.

This analogy came to us in the wake of Amazon’s reporting of its financial results for the first quarter of …

The Datacenter Does Not Revolve Around AWS, Despite Its Gravity was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Moves Xeons To The Moore’s Law Leading Edge

In the wake of the Technology and Manufacturing Day event that Intel hosted last month, we were pondering this week about what effect the tick-tock-clock method of advancing chip designs and manufacturing processes might have on the Xeon server chip line from Intel, and we suggested that it might close the gaps between the Core client chips and the Xeons. It turns out that Intel is not only going to close the gaps, but reverse them and put the Xeons on the leading edge.

To be precise, Brian Krzanich, Intel’s chief financial officer, and Robert Swan, the company’s chief financial …

Intel Moves Xeons To The Moore’s Law Leading Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mapping Intel’s Tick Tock Clock Onto Xeon Processors

Chip maker Intel takes Moore’s Law very seriously, and not just because one of its founders observed the consistent rate at which the price of a transistor scales down with each tweak in manufacturing. Moore’s Law is not just personal with Intel. It is business because Intel is a chip maker first and a chip designer second, and that is how it has been able to take over the desktops and datacenters of the world.

Last month, the top brass in Intel’s chip manufacturing operations vigorously defended Moore’s Law, contending that not only was the two year cadence of …

Mapping Intel’s Tick Tock Clock Onto Xeon Processors was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pushing A Trillion Row Database With GPU Acceleration

There is an arms race in the nascent market for GPU-accelerated databases, and the winner will be the one that can scale to the largest datasets while also providing the most compatibility with industry-standard SQL.

MapD and Kinetica are the leaders in this market, but BlazingDB, Blazegraph, and PG-Strom also in the field, and we think it won’t be long before the commercial relational database makers start adding GPU acceleration to their products, much as they have followed SAP HANA with in-memory processing.

MapD is newer than Kinetica, and it up until now, it has been content to allow clustering …

Pushing A Trillion Row Database With GPU Acceleration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Riding The Virtual SAN Gravy Train

Being the first mover in establishing a new technology in the enterprise is important, but it is not more important than having a vast installed base and sales force peddling an existing and adjacent product set in which to sell a competing and usually lagging technology.

VMware can’t be said to have initially been particularly enthusiastic about server-SAN hybrids like those created by upstart Nutanix, with its Acropolis platform, or pioneer Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which bought into the virtual SAN market with its LeftHand Networks acquisition in October 2008 for $360 million and went back to the hyperconverged well …

Riding The Virtual SAN Gravy Train was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

International Cognitive And Cloud Business Machines

International Business Machines has gone through so many changes in its eleven decades of existence, and it is important to remember that some days. If IBM’s recent changes are a bit bewildering, as they were in the late 1980s, the middle 1990s, and the early 2010s in particular, they are perhaps nothing compared the changes that were wrought to transform a maker of meat slicers, time clocks, and tabulating equipment derived from looms.

Yeah, and you thought turning GPUs into compute engines was a stretch.

Herman Hollerith, who graduated from Columbia University in 1879 when its engineering school was still …

International Cognitive And Cloud Business Machines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business

Chip maker Intel is getting out of the business of trying to make money with a commercially supported release of the high-end Lustre parallel file system. Lustre is commonly used at HPC centers and is increasingly deployed by enterprises to take on their biggest file system jobs.

But don’t jump too far to any other conclusions. The core development and support team, minus a few key people who have already left, remains at Intel and will be working on Lustre for the foreseeable future.

Intel quietly announced its plans to shutter its Lustre commercialization efforts in a posting earlier this …

Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Docker Completes Its Platform With DIY Linux

It all started with a new twist on an old idea, that of a lightweight software container running inside Linux that would house applications and make them portable. And now Docker is coming full circle and completing its eponymous platform by opening up the tools to allow users to create their own minimalist Linux operating system that is containerized and modular above the kernel and that only gives applications precisely what they need to run.

The new LinuxKit is not so much a variant of Linux as a means of creating them. The toolkit for making Linuxes, which was unveiled …

Docker Completes Its Platform With DIY Linux was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Machine Learning Gets An InfiniBand Boost With Caffe2

Scaling the performance of machine learning frameworks so they can train larger neural networks – or so the same training a lot faster – has meant that the hyperscalers of the world who are essentially creating this technology have had to rely on increasingly beefy compute nodes, these days almost universally augmented with GPUs.

There is a healthy rivalry between the hyperscalers over who has the best machine learning framework and the co-designed iron to take the best advantage of its capabilities. At its F8 developer conference, Facebook not only rolled out a significantly tweaked variant of the open source …

Machine Learning Gets An InfiniBand Boost With Caffe2 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

FPGAs To Shake Up Stodgy Relational Databases

So you are a system architect, and you want to make the databases behind your applications run a lot faster. There are a lot of different ways to accomplish this, and now, there is yet another — and perhaps more disruptive — one.

You can move the database storage from disk drives to flash memory, You can move from a row-based database to a columnar data store that segments data and speeds up accesses to it. And for even more of a performance boost, you can pull that columnar data into main memory to be read and manipulated at memory …

FPGAs To Shake Up Stodgy Relational Databases was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hyperscaling With Consumer Flash And NVM-Express

There is no question that plenty of companies are shifting their storage infrastructure from giant NAS and SAN appliances to more generic file, block, and object storage running on plain vanilla X86 servers equipped with flash and disk. And similarly, companies are looking to the widespread availability of dual-ported NVM-Express drives on servers to give them screaming flash performance on those storage servers.

But the fact remains that very few companies want to build and support their own storage servers, and moreover, there is still room for an appliance approach to these commodity components for enterprises that want to buy …

Hyperscaling With Consumer Flash And NVM-Express was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Does Google’s TPU Investment Make Sense Going Forward?

Google created quite a stir when it released architectural details and performance metrics for its homegrown Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) accelerator for machine learning algorithms last week. But as we (and many of you reading) pointed out, comparing the TPU to earlier “Kepler” generation GPUs from Nvidia was not exactly a fair comparison. Nvidia has done much in the “Maxwell” and “Pascal” GPU generations specifically to boost machine learning performance.

To set the record straight, Nvidia took some time and ran some benchmarks of its own to put the performance of its latest Pascal accelerators, particularly the ones it aims …

Does Google’s TPU Investment Make Sense Going Forward? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Xeon E3: A Lesson In Moore’s Law And Dennard Scaling

If you want an object lesson in the interplay between Moore’s Law, Dennard scaling, and the desire to make money from selling chips, you need look no further than the past several years of Intel’s Xeon E3 server chip product lines.

The Xeon E3 chips are illustrative particularly because Intel has kept the core count constant for these processors, which are used in a variety of gear, from workstations (remote and local), entry servers to storage controllers to microservers employed at hyperscalers and even for certain HPC workloads (like Intel’s own massive EDA chip design and validation farms). …

Xeon E3: A Lesson In Moore’s Law And Dennard Scaling was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.