Cineca’s HPC Systems Tackle Italy’s Biggest Computing Challenges

With over 700 employees, Cineca is Italy’s largest and most advanced high performance computing (HPC) center, channeling their systems expertise to benefit organizations across the nation. Comprised of six Italian research institutions, 70 Italian universities, and the Italian Ministry of Education, Cineca is a privately held, non-profit consortium.

The team at Cineca dedicates itself to tackling the greatest computational challenges faced by public and private companies, and research institutions.  With so many organizations depending on Italy’s HPC centers, Cineca relies on Intel® technologies to reliably and efficiently further the country’s innovations in scientific computing, web and networking-based services, big data …

Cineca’s HPC Systems Tackle Italy’s Biggest Computing Challenges was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

ARM Antes Up For An HPC Software Stack

The HPC community is trying to solve the critical compute challenges of next generation high performance computing and ARM considers itself well-positioned to act as a catalyst in this regard. Applications like machine learning and scientific computing are driving demands for orders of magnitude improvements in capacity, capability and efficiency to achieve exascale computing for next generation deployments.

ARM has been taking a co-design approach with the ecosystem from silicon to system design to application development to provide innovative solutions that address this challenge. The recent Allinea acquisition is one example of ARM’s commitment to HPC, but ARM has worked …

ARM Antes Up For An HPC Software Stack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A Peek Inside Facebook’s Server Fleet Upgrade

Having a proliferation of server makes and models over a span of years in the datacenter is not a huge deal for most enterprises. They cope with the diversity because they support a diversity of application and can kind of keep things isolated and, moreover, IT may be integral to their product or service, but it is usually not the actual product or service that they sell.

Not so with hyperscalers and cloud builders. For them, the IT is the product, and keeping things as monolithic and consistent as possible lowers the cost of goods purchased through higher volumes and …

A Peek Inside Facebook’s Server Fleet Upgrade was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Windows Server Comes To ARM Chips, But Only For Azure

The rumors have been running around for years, and they turned out to be true. Microsoft, the world’s largest operating system supplier and still the dominant seller of systems software for the datacenter, has indeed been working for years on a port of its Windows Server 2016 operating system to the ARM server chip architecture.

The rumors about Windows Server on ARM started in earnest back in October 2014, which just before Qualcomm threw its hat into the ARM server ring and when Cavium and Applied Micro were in the market and starting to plan the generation of chips …

Windows Server Comes To ARM Chips, But Only For Azure was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

ARM And AMD X86 Server Chips Get Mainstream Lift From Microsoft

If you want real competition among vendors who supply stuff to you, then sometimes you have to make it happen by yourself. The hyperscalers and big cloud builders of the world can do that, and increasingly they are taking the initiative and fostering such competition for compute.

With its first generation of Open Cloud Servers, which were conceptualized in 2012, put into production for its Azure public cloud in early 2013, and open sourced through the Open Compute Project in January 2014, Microsoft decided to leverage the power of the open source hardware community to make its own server …

ARM And AMD X86 Server Chips Get Mainstream Lift From Microsoft was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How AMD’s Naples X86 Server Chip Stacks Up To Intel’s Xeons

Ever so slowly, and not so fast as to give competitor Intel too much information about what it is up to, but just fast enough to build interest in the years of engineering smarts that has gone into its forthcoming “Naples” X86 server processor, AMD is lifting the veil on the product that will bring it back into the datacenter and that will bring direct competition to the Xeon platform that dominates modern computing infrastructure.

It has been a bit of a rolling thunder revelation of information about the Zen core used in the “Naples” server chip, the brand of …

How AMD’s Naples X86 Server Chip Stacks Up To Intel’s Xeons was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Naples Opterons Give AMD A Second Chance In Servers

There are not a lot of second chances in the IT racket. AMD wants one, and we think, has earned one.

Such second chances are hard to come by, and we can rattle off a few of them because they are so rare. Intel pivoted from a memory maker to a processor maker in the mid-1980s, and has come to dominate compute in everything but handheld devices. In the mid-1990s, IBM failed to understand the RISC/Unix and X86 server waves swamping the datacenter and nearly went bankrupt and salvaged itself as software and services provider to glass houses. A decade …

Naples Opterons Give AMD A Second Chance In Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Docker Reaches The Enterprise Milestone

In the server virtualization era, there were a couple of virtual machine formats and hypervisors to match them, and despite the desire for a common VM format, the virtual server stacks got siloed into ESXi, KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V stacks with some spicing of PowerVM, Solaris containers and LDOMs, and VM/ESA partitions sprinkled on.

With containers, the consensus has been largely to support the Docker format that was inspired by the foundational Linux container work done by Google, and Docker, the company, was the early and enthusiastic proponent of its way of the Docker way of doing containers.

Now, Docker …

Docker Reaches The Enterprise Milestone was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Server Makers Try To Adapt To A Harsher Climate

So, who was the biggest revenue generator, and showing the largest growth in sales, for servers in the final quarter of 2016? Was it Hewlett Packard Enterprise? Was it Dell Technologies? Was it IBM or Cisco Systems or one of the ODMs? Nope. It was the Others category comprised of dozens of vendors that sit outside of the top tier OEMs we know by name and the collective ODMs of the world who some of us know by name.

This is a sign that the server ecosystem is getting more diverse under pressure as the technical and economic climate changes …

Server Makers Try To Adapt To A Harsher Climate was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Bouncing Back To Private Clouds With OpenStack

There is an adage, not quite yet old, suggesting that compute is free but storage is not. Perhaps a more accurate and, as far as public clouds are concerned, apt adaptation of this saying might be that computing and storage are free, and so are inbound networking within a region, but moving data across regions in a public cloud is brutally expensive, and it is even more costly spanning regions.

So much so that, at a certain scale, it makes sense to build your own datacenter and create your own infrastructure hardware and software stack that mimics the salient characteristics …

Bouncing Back To Private Clouds With OpenStack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mixed Signals From Server Land

With a new generation of Xeon processors coming out later this year from Intel and AMD trying to get back in the game with its own X86 server chips – they probably will not be called Opterons – it is not a surprise to us that server makers are having a bit of trouble making their numbers in recent months. But we are beginning to wonder if something else might be going on here than the usual pause before a big set of processor announcements.

In many ways, server spending is a leading indicator because when companies are willing to …

Mixed Signals From Server Land was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It

There is an old joke that in the post-apocalyptic world that comes about because of plague or nuclear war, only two things will be left alive: cockroaches and Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones. As it hails from New York City, you can understand why Cockroach Labs, the upstart software company that is cloning Google’s Spanner distributed relational database, chose that particular bug to epitomize a system that will stay alive no matter what. But, they could have just as easily called it RichardsDB.

When discussing Google’s cloud implementation of Spanner, which launched in beta earlier this …

Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Japan Keeps Accelerating With Tsubame 3.0 AI Supercomputer

The Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been at the forefront of accelerated computing, and well before GPUs came along and made acceleration not only cool but affordable and normal. But its latest system, Tsubame 3.0, being installed later this year, the Japanese supercomputing center is going to lay the hardware foundation for a new kind of HPC application that brings together simulation and modeling and machine learning workloads.

The hot new idea in HPC circles is not just being able to run machine learning workloads side by side with simulations, but to …

Japan Keeps Accelerating With Tsubame 3.0 AI Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

What Bellwether Cisco Reveals About Datacenter Spending

As the world’s dominant supplier of switches and routers into the datacenter and one of the big providers of servers (with a hope of transforming part of that server businesses into a sizeable hyperconverged storage business), Cisco Systems provides a kind of lens into the glass houses of the world. You can see what companies are doing – and what they are not doing – and watch how Cisco reacts to try to give them what they need while trying to extract the maximum profit out of its customers.

Say what you will, but Cisco has spent the last …

What Bellwether Cisco Reveals About Datacenter Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why Google’s Spanner Database Won’t Do As Well As Its Clone

Google has proven time and again it is on the extreme bleeding edge of invention when it comes to scale out architectures that make supercomputers look like toys. But what would the world look like if the search engine giant had started selling capacity on its vast infrastructure back in 2005, before Amazon Web Services launched, and then shortly thereafter started selling capacity on its high level platform services? And what if it had open sourced these technologies, as it has done with the Kubernetes container controller?

The world would be surely different, and the reason it is not is …

Why Google’s Spanner Database Won’t Do As Well As Its Clone was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Tesla Compute Business Quadruples In Q4

If Nvidia’s Datacenter business unit was a startup and separate from the company, we would all be talking about the long investment it has made in GPU-based computing and how the company has moved from the blade of the hockey stick and rounded the bend and is moving rapidly up the handle with triple-digit revenue growth and an initial public offering on the horizon.

But the part of Nvidia’s business that is driven by its Tesla compute engines and GRID visualization engines is not a separate company and it is not going public. Still, that business is sure making things …

Nvidia Tesla Compute Business Quadruples In Q4 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Locking Down Docker To Open Up Enterprise Adoption

It happens time and time again with any new technology. Coders create this new thing, it gets deployed as an experiment and, if it is an open source project, shared with the world. As its utility is realized, adoption suddenly spikes with the do-it-yourself crowd that is eager to solve a particular problem. And then, as more mainstream enterprises take an interest, the talk turns to security.

It’s like being told to grow up by a grownup, to eat your vegetables. In fact, it isn’t like that at all. It is precisely that, and it is healthy for any technology …

Locking Down Docker To Open Up Enterprise Adoption was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cray Outpaces HPC Market, Books Historic Quarter

It is hard to tell which part of the systems market is lumpier – that for traditional HPC systems like supercomputers or that for massive cluster deployments for the hyperscalers that run public clouds and public facing applications on a massive scale. But what we do know for sure is that the HPC market is slowing down, and that the bellwether for that market, Cray, is doing better than that market according to its latest financial results.

Despite the softness in the traditional HPC market for clusters to run simulations and models (partly driven by the political climates around the …

Cray Outpaces HPC Market, Books Historic Quarter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Inside That Big Silicon Valley Hyperscale Supermicro Deal

Among the major companies that design and sell servers with their own brands, which are called original equipment manufacturers or OEMs, and those that co-design machines with customers and then make them, which are called original design manufacturers or ODMs, Supermicro stands apart. It does not fall precisely into either category. The company makes system components, like motherboards and enclosures, for those who want to build their own systems or those who want to sell systems to others, and it also makes complete systems, sold in onesies or twosies or sold by the hundreds of racks.

Supermicro is also a …

Inside That Big Silicon Valley Hyperscale Supermicro Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Putting ARM-Based Microservers Through The Paces

When ARM officials and partners several years ago began talking about pushing the low-power chip architecture from our phones and tablets and into the datacenter, the initial target was the emerging field of microservers – small, highly dense and highly efficient systems aimed at the growing number of cloud providers and hyperscale environments where power efficiency was as important as performance.

The thinking was that the low-power ARM architecture that was found in almost all consumer devices would fit into the energy-conscious parts of the server space that Intel was having troubling reaching with its more power-hungry Xeon processors. It …

Putting ARM-Based Microservers Through The Paces was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.