Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Timothy Prickett Morgan
ThunderX2 Arms Hyperscale And HPC Compute
In the long run, networking chip giant and one-time server chip wannabe Broadcom might regret selling off its “Vulcan” 64-bit Arm chip business to Cavium, soon to be part of Marvell. The ThunderX2 processors based on the Vulcan designs have been tweaked by Cavium and have been enthusiastically tire-kicked by hyperscalers and HPC centers alike, and are looking like the front runner as a competitor to the X86 architecture for these customers.
The 32-core Vulcan variants of the ThunderX2, which we detailed last November, are getting their own coming out party in San Francisco now that they …
ThunderX2 Arms Hyperscale And HPC Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Successful Machine Learning With A Global Data Fabric
One of the most common misconceptions about machine learning is that success is solely due to its dynamic algorithms. In reality, the learning potential of those algorithms and their models are driven by the data preparation, staging and delivery. When suitably fed, machine learning algorithms work wonders. Their success, however, is ultimately rooted in the data logistics.
Data logistics are integral to how sufficient training data is accessed. They determine how easily new models are deployed. They specify how changes in data content can be isolated to compare models. And, they facilitate how multiple models are effectively used as part …
Successful Machine Learning With A Global Data Fabric was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel Teaches Quantum Computing 101
A team at Intel, in collaboration with QuTech in the Netherlands, is researching the possibilities of quantum computing to better understand how practical quantum computers can be programmed to impact our lives. Given the research nature and current limitations of quantum computers, particularly in terms of I/O, researchers are focusing on specific types of algorithms.
As you might expect, Intel Labs is focused on applications such as material science and quantum chemistry. Other possible algorithms include parameterized simulations and various combinatorial optimization problems that have a global optimum. It is also worth noting that this research may never come to …
Intel Teaches Quantum Computing 101 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Capitalizing On Hybrid Cloud In HPC
Cloud computing became an essential infrastructure strategy for nearly every business. Last year Gartner predicted that demand for infrastructure as a service would increase by 36.8 percent. A 2018 McAfee survey found that 97 percent of organizations are using cloud services from public, private or both. Similarly, Rightscale’s 2018 cloud survey showed that 95 percent of enteprises have a cloud strategy, including 51 percent with a hybrid cloud strategy.
Yet, despite the cloud’s ubiquity, and the fact that HPC in the cloud has been possible for more than a decade – Univa commissioned the very first HPC cluster in AWS …
Capitalizing On Hybrid Cloud In HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
New AI Being Mostly Used To Solve Old Problems
In the first article outlining some of the results from our AI survey, we discussed how most customers are just beginning their journey into AI and that very few have actual AI applications in production. In this article, we are going to talk about the whats and whys behind AI. In other words, why customers are looking into AI, what problems they are trying to solve, what they expect to get out of it, and what sort of data they are analyzing.
One of the more interesting aspects of the survey is that it shows how real-world customers are …
New AI Being Mostly Used To Solve Old Problems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Feeding The Insatiable Bandwidth Beast
Breaking into any part of the IT stack against incumbents with vast installed bases is not easy task. Cutting edge technology is table stakes, and targeting precise customers with specific needs is the only way to get a toehold. It also takes money. Lots of money. Innovium, the upstart Ethernet switch chip maker, has all three and is set to make some inroads among the hyperscalers and cloud builders.
We told you all about Innovium back in March last year, when the company, founded by former networking executives and engineers from Intel and Broadcom, dropped out of stealth and …
Feeding The Insatiable Bandwidth Beast was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Sluggish Moore’s Law Doesn’t Impede Intel One Bit
The demand for compute is so strong among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that nothing seems to be slowing down Intel’s datacenter business. Not delays in processor rollouts due to the difficulties in ramping 14 nanometer and 10 nanometer processes as the pace of Moore’s Law increases in transistor density and the lowering of the cost of chips slows. Not what is a pretty substantial price increase that accompanies the core scale out and feature expansion in the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors. Not the credible competition from IBM, AMD, Cavium, and Qualcomm.
The sun is shining on the datacenter, and …
Sluggish Moore’s Law Doesn’t Impede Intel One Bit was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The Slow But Sure Return Of AMD In The Datacenter
It has been more than a decade since AMD was a force in computing in the datacenter. For that reason, we have not wasted a lot of time going over the ins and outs of its quarterly financials. But now that the Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPU accelerators are getting traction among hyperscalers, cloud builders, and selected enterprises, it is time to start keeping an eye on how AMD is doing financially.
With most of the financial analysis that we do here at The Next Platform, we use the middle of the Great Recession, in the first quarter …
The Slow But Sure Return Of AMD In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Recruiting The Puppet Masters Of Infrastructure
All kinds of convergence is going on in infrastructure these days, with the mashing up of servers and storage or servers and networking, or sometimes all three at once. This convergence is not just occurring at the system hardware or basic system software level. It is also happening up and down the software stack, with a lot of codebases branching out from various starting points and building platforms of one kind or another.
Some platforms stay down at the server hardware level – think of the Cisco Systems UCS blade server, which mashes up servers and networking – while others …
Recruiting The Puppet Masters Of Infrastructure was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Red Hat Gets Serious About Selling Open Source Storage
If there is one consistent complaint about open source software over the past three decades that it has been on the rise, it is that it is too difficult to integrate various components to solve a particular problem because the software is not really enterprise grade stuff. Well, that is two complaints, and really, there are three because even if you can get the stuff integrated and running well, that doesn’t mean you can keep it in that state as you patch and update it. So now we are up to three complaints.
Eventually, all software needs to be packaged …
Red Hat Gets Serious About Selling Open Source Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Lagging In AI? Don’t Worry, It’s Still Early
Without splitting a lot of hairs on definitions, it is safe to say that machine learning in its myriad forms is absolutely shaking up data processing. The techniques for training neural networks to chew through mountains of labeled data and make inferences against new data are set to transform every aspect of computation and automation. There is a mad dash to do something, as there always is at the beginning of every technology hype cycle.
Enterprises need to breathe. The hyperscalers are perfecting these technologies, which are changing fast, and by the time things settle out and the software …
Lagging In AI? Don’t Worry, It’s Still Early was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Making The Case For Fully Converged Arm Servers
There has been a lot of research and development devoted to bringing the Arm architecture to servers and storage in the datacenter, and a lot of that has focused on making beefier and usually custom Arm cores that look more like an X86 core than they do the kind of compute element we find in our smartphones and tablets. The other way to bring Arm to the datacenter is to use more modest processing elements and to gang a lot of them up together, cramming a lot more cores in a rack and making up the performance in volume.
This …
Making The Case For Fully Converged Arm Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The Majority Of Systems Sold Are Converged, Maybe
In the early days of computing in the datacenter, vendors of systems pretty much owned their platforms, from the chip all the way up to the compiler.
When you invested in an IBM, Sperry, Burroughs, NEC, Bull, Hitachi, or Fujitsu mainframe, or one of the myriad minicomputer systems from Big Blue, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, or eventually Unix systems from Sun Microsystems and its competition (mainly Data General, SGI, HP, and IBM), you were really investing in a way of computing life. A lot of the decisions about what to buy were already made, and you didn’t have to think much about …
The Majority Of Systems Sold Are Converged, Maybe was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking
It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. But in the first quarter of this year, network chip, adapter, switch, and cable supplier Mellanox Technologies – which has products aimed at all three of these segments – managed to do it.
And with activist investor, Starboard Value, pressing Mellanox to make the kinds of profits that other networking companies command, the swing to a very decent net income could not have come at a better time. Starboard has been on the …
Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The Contradictions Of IBM’s Platform Strategy
The thing about platforms that have a wide adoption and deep history is that they tend to persist. They have such economic inertia that, so long as they can keep morphing and grafting on new technologies, that they persist long after alternatives have emerged and dominated data processing. Every company ultimately wants to build a platform for this reason, and has since the dawn of commercial computing, for precisely this reason, for this inertia – it takes too much effort to change or replace it – is what generates the profits.
It is with this in mind that we contemplate …
The Contradictions Of IBM’s Platform Strategy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Cray’s Ever-Expanding Compute For HPC
With choice comes complexity, and the Cambrian explosion in compute options is only going to make this harder even if it is a much more satisfying intellectual and financial challenge. This added complexity is worth it because companies will be able to more closely align the hardware to the applications. This is why search engine giant Google has been driving compute diversity and why supercomputer maker Cray has been looking forward to it as well.
This expanding of the compute ecosystem is also necessary because big jumps in raw compute performance for general purpose processors are possible as they were …
Cray’s Ever-Expanding Compute For HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
VMware’s Platform Can Only Reflect The Enterprise Datacenter
When a company has 500,000 enterprise customers that are paying for perpetual licenses and support on systems software – this is an absolutely enormous base by corporate standards, and a retro licensing model straight from the 1980s and 1990s – what does it do for an encore?
That’s a very good question, and for now the answer for VMware seems to be to sell virtual storage and virtual networking networking to that vast base of virtual compute customers, and take wheelbarrows full of money to the bank on behalf of parent Dell Technologies. Virtualization took root during the Great Recession …
VMware’s Platform Can Only Reflect The Enterprise Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Docker Inevitably Embraces Kubernetes Container Orchestration
Sometimes you can beat them, and sometimes you can join them. If you are Docker, the commercial entity behind the Docker container runtime and a stack of enterprise-class software that wraps around it, and you are facing the rising popularity of the Kubernetes container orchestrator open sourced by Google, you can do both. And so, even though it has its own Swarm orchestration layer, Docker is embracing Kubernetes as a peer to Swarm in its own stack.
This is not an either/or proposition, and in fact, the way that the company has integrated Kubernetes inside of Docker Enterprise Edition, the …
Docker Inevitably Embraces Kubernetes Container Orchestration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Another Step In Building The HPC Ecosystem For Arm
Many of us are impatient for Arm processors to take off in the datacenter in general and in HPC in particular. And ever so slowly, it looks like it is starting to happen.
Every system buyer wants choice because choice increases competition, which lowers cost and mitigates against risk. But no organization, no matter how large, can afford to build its own software ecosystem. Even the hyperscalers like Google and Facebook, whole literally make money on the apps running on their vast infrastructure, rely heavily on the open source community, taking as much as they give back. So it is …
Another Step In Building The HPC Ecosystem For Arm was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The Battle Of The InfiniBands, Part Two
For decades, the IT market has been obsessed with the competition between suppliers of processors, but there are rivalries between the makers of networking chips and the full-blown switches that are based on them that are just as intense. Such a rivalry exists between the InfiniBand chips from Mellanox Technologies and the Omni-Path chips from Intel, which are based on technologies Intel got six years ago when it acquired the InfiniBand business from QLogic for $125 million.
At the time, we quipped that AMD needed to buy Mellanox, but instead AMD turned right around and shelled out $334 million to …
The Battle Of The InfiniBands, Part Two was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.