Intel’s Data Center Group Has Its Head In The Clouds

The cloud gives, and it takes away.

The big hyperscalers, public cloud builders, and telecom, wireless, and cable service providers who are all collectively called “cloud” when it comes to the infrastructure they build, and they are increasingly driving shipments and revenues of all manner of components. But they command, by virtue of their huge volumes, discounts that are much deeper than the typical enterprise customer can get when they buy through an OEM or, if they are large enough, an ODM.

The fact that Intel’s Data Center Group is managing to profit pretty handsomely and reasonably predictably despite this …

Intel’s Data Center Group Has Its Head In The Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived?

Seymour Cray loved vector supercomputers, and made the second part of that term a household word because of it. NEC, the last of the pure vector supercomputer makers, is so excited about its new “Aurora” SX-10+ vector processor and the “Tsubasa” supercomputer that will use it that it forgot to announce the processor to the world when it previewed the system this week.

Here at The Next Platform, we easily forgive such putting of carts before horses – so long as someone eventually explains the horse to us before the cart starts shipping for real. NEC is expected to …

Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud

It must be tough for the hyperscalers that are expanding into public cloud and the public cloud builders that also use their datacenters to run their own businesses to decide whether to hoard all of the new technologies that they can get their hands on for their own benefit, or to make money selling that capacity to others.

For any new, and usually constrained, kind of capacity, such as shiny new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel or “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia, it has to be a hard call for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to …

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Dream Of Software Only Shared Memory Clusters

It is hard to quantify the amount of effort in systems and application software development that has been done precisely because there is no easy, efficient, and cheap way to make a bunch of cheap commodity servers look like one wonking system with a big ole flat memory space that is as easy to program as a PC but which brings to bear all that compute, memory, and I/O of a cluster as a single system image.

We have SMP and NUMA glue chips to do such shared memory clustering in hardware, scaling from two to four and sometimes eight, …

The Dream Of Software Only Shared Memory Clusters was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Demystifies Deep Learning For Faster Intelligence

Today’s enterprises need deep learning, but most don’t know how to get started. As rising data volumes and evolving industry trends push the limits of traditional IT, the latest innovations are helping them operate faster and smarter—and high performance computing is just the beginning.

Enterprises are deploying robust server platforms to power HPC applications, leveraging optimal performance, reliability, and flexibility to handle increasingly dense workloads. And with these industry-leading tools, modeling and simulation capabilities are rapidly evolving. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we operate and relate to technology. AI allows machines to think and learn like the human brain, while …

HPE Demystifies Deep Learning For Faster Intelligence was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

BSC Builds 21st Century HPC In A 19th Century Cathedral

This summer, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) added to its roster another of the world’s most powerful high performance computing systems. The Barcelona Computing Center’s new MareNostrum 4, delivered by IBM with the help of partners Lenovo and Fujitsu, and fueled by HPC technologies from Intel, will facilitate extensive engineering and scientific research in fields like astrophysics, weather forecasting, and genome research. Nestled within a unique building – the Torre Girona chapel, which fell out of use – the fourth generation MareNostrum system relies on a general purpose cluster working with three specialized clusters to achieve its …

BSC Builds 21st Century HPC In A 19th Century Cathedral was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The IBM Transformation Can Gather Steam Now

For the past five and a half years, which is not quite an eternity in the IT business but is something akin to a half of a generation or so, IBM’s revenues have been declining, quarter in and quarter out. As has happened many, many times in its more than century of existence, Big Blue, which used to be a peddler of meat slicers, time machines, scales, and punch card tabulators early in its history, has had to constantly evolve and reimagine itself.

The transformation that IBM had to undergo in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a near …

The IBM Transformation Can Gather Steam Now was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Getting With The Program On Software Defined Networks

If the profit margins are under pressure among the switch and router makers of the world, their chief financial officers can probably place a lot of the blame on Nick McKeown and his several partners throughout the years. And if McKeown is right about what is happening as the network software is increasingly disaggregated from the hardware – what is called software defined networking – they will either have to adapt or be relegated to the dustbins of history.

McKeown cut his teeth after university in the late 1980s at Hewlett Packard Labs in Bristol, England, one of the hotbeds …

Getting With The Program On Software Defined Networks was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Preps Power9 For AI And HPC Launch, Forges Big NUMA Iron

After a long, long wait and years of anticipation, it looks like IBM is finally getting ready to ship commercial versions of its Power9 chips, and as expected, its first salvo of processors aimed at the datacenter will be aimed at HPC, data analytics, and machine learning workloads.

We are also catching wind about IBM’s Power9-based scale-up NUMA machines, which will debut sometime next year and take on big iron systems based on Intel Xeon SP, Oracle Sparc M8, and Fujitsu Sparc64-XII processors as well as give some competition to IBM’s own System z14 mainframes.

The US Department …

IBM Preps Power9 For AI And HPC Launch, Forges Big NUMA Iron was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

New Optimizations Improve Deep Learning Frameworks For CPUs

Today, most machine learning is done on processors. Some would say that acceleration of learning has to be done on GPUs, but for most users that is not good advice for several reasons. The biggest reason is now the Intel Xeon SP processor, formerly codenamed “Skylake.”

Up until recently, the software for machine learning has been often more optimized for GPUs than anything else. A series of efforts by Intel have changed that – and when coupled with Platinum version of the Intel Xeon SP family, the top performance gap is closer to 2X than it is to 100X. This …

New Optimizations Improve Deep Learning Frameworks For CPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Japan’s ABCI System Shows The Subtleties Separating AI And HPC

Governments like to spread the money around their indigenous IT companies when they can, and so it is with the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, or ABCI, supercomputer that is being commissioned by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. NEC built the ABCI prototype last year, and now Fujitsu has been commissioned to build the actual ABCI system.

The resulting machine, which is being purchased specifically to offer cloud access to compute and storage capacity for artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads, would make a fine system for running HPC simulation and models. But that …

Japan’s ABCI System Shows The Subtleties Separating AI And HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Takes First Steps To Universal Quantum Computing

Someone is going to commercialize a general purpose, universal quantum computer first, and Intel wants to be the first. So does Google. So does IBM. And D-Wave is pretty sure it already has done this, even if many academics and a slew of upstart competitors don’t agree. What we can all agree on is that there is a very long road ahead in the development of quantum computing, and it will be a costly endeavor that could nonetheless help solve some intractable problems.

This week, Intel showed off the handiwork its engineers and those of partner QuTech, a …

Intel Takes First Steps To Universal Quantum Computing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Public Cloud Doesn’t Dominate IT Quite Yet

Everyone in the IT industry likes drama, and we here at The Next Platform are no different. But it is also important as the industry in undergoing gut-wrenching transformations, as it has been for five decades now and will probably do so for a decade or two more, to keep some perspective. While the public cloud is certainly an exciting part of the IT market, it hasn’t taken over the world even if it has become the dominant metaphor that all kinds of IT – public, private, and hybrid – aspired to mimic.

That’s something, and it is important. But …

Public Cloud Doesn’t Dominate IT Quite Yet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Clever Machinations Of Livermore’s Sierra Supercomputer

The potent combination of powerful CPUs, floating point laden GPU accelerators, and fast InfiniBand networking are coming to market and reshaping the upper echelons of supercomputing. While Intel is having issues with its future Knights massively parallel X86 processors, which it has not really explained, the two capability class supercomputers that are being built for the US Department of Energy by IBM with the help of Nvidia and Mellanox Technologies, named “Summit” and ‘Sierra” and installed at Oak Ridge National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are beginning to be assembled.

We have previously profiled the nodes in …

The Clever Machinations Of Livermore’s Sierra Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Oracle Emulates Google, AWS On Its Cloud

During the dot-com boom, when Oracle was the dominant supplier of relational databases to startups and established enterprises alike, it used its profits to fund the acquisition of application serving middleware, notably BEA WebLogic, and then applications, such as PeopleSoft and Siebel, and then Java and hardware systems, from its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. It was an expensive proposition, but one that paid off handsomely for the software giant.

In the cloud and hyperscale era, open source middleware is the driving force and in a lot of cases there is nothing to acquire. Projects either go open themselves or are …

Oracle Emulates Google, AWS On Its Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Gears Up For FPGA Push

Chip giant Intel has been talking about CPU-FPGA compute complexes for so long that it is hard to remember sometimes that its hybrid Xeon-Arria compute unit, which puts a Xeon server chip and a midrange FPGA into a single Xeon processor socket, is not shipping as a volume product. But Intel is working to get it into the field and has given The Next Platform an update on the current plan.

The hybrid CPU-FPGA devices, which are akin to AMD’s Accelerated Computing Units, or APUs, in that they put compute and, in this case, GPU acceleration into a single …

Intel Gears Up For FPGA Push was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How Oakforest-PACS Outpaced The K Supercomputer

In high performance computing in the public sector, dollars follow teraflops and now petaflops. Especially in the datacenters of academia, where cutting-edge computational research projects funded by large grants seek the most powerful supercomputers in the region.

Institutions with limited budgets these days are creatively solving their financial supercomputing needs by creating a collective that pools funds and shares computing resources. Some institutions, such as Iowa State University, are doing this internally, with various departments pitching in to buy a single, large HPC cluster, as with their Condo supercomputer.

In Japan, the University of Tokyo (U Tokyo) and University of …

How Oakforest-PACS Outpaced The K Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Harnessing Data Insights To Achieve Optimal Energy Consumption

In an age of ongoing digital advancement, leaders across all industries are seeking new ways to improve workplace productivity, ensure competitive advantage, and facilitate continued growth. Success hinges on their ability to accelerate time to value, and work more efficiently and effectively than the competition. Innovation and sustainability are key.

This is particularly true for the energy, oil, and gas (EOG) sector. As the global economy progressively moves away from fossil fuels in search of renewable resources, EOG companies are challenged to operate faster and smarter than ever before. Many organizations are utilizing high performance computing (HPC) technologies in order …

Harnessing Data Insights To Achieve Optimal Energy Consumption was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Volta GPU Accelerators Hit The Streets

Announcements of new iron are exciting, but it doesn’t get real until customers beyond the handful of elite early adopters can get their hands on the gear.

Nvidia launched its “Volta” Tesla V100 GPU accelerators back in May, meeting and in some important ways exceeding most of its performance goals, and has been shipping devices, both in PCI-Express and SXM2 form factors, for a few months. Now, the ramp of this complex processor and its packaging of stacked High Bandwidth Memory – HMB2 from Samsung, to be specific – is progressing and the server OEMs and ODMs of the …

Volta GPU Accelerators Hit The Streets was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics

It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute.

Network attached storage, as pioneered by NetApp, helped break those links between compute and storage in the enterprise at the file level. But it was the advent of storage area networks that allowed for storage to still be reasonably tightly coupled to servers and work at the lower block level, below file systems, while at the same time allowing that storage to scale independently from the number of disks you might jam into a single …

The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.