The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox

We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass.

It is with this in mind, and as more of a thought experiment than a desire, that we consider the fate of International Business Machines in the datacenter. In many ways, other companies have long …

The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A New Twist On Adding Data Persistence To Containers

Containers continue to gain momentum as organizations look for greater efficiencies and lower costs to run distributed applications in their increasingly virtualized datacenters as well as for improving their application development environments. As we have noted before, containers are becoming more common in the enterprise, though they still have a way to go before being fully embraced in high performance computing circles.

There are myriad advantages to containers, from being able to spin them up much faster than virtual machine instances on hypervisors and to pack more containers than virtual machines on a host system to gaining efficiencies …

A New Twist On Adding Data Persistence To Containers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

When Will AWS Move Up The Stack To Real Applications?

Imagine how little fun online retailer Amazon would be having on its quarterly calls if it had not launched its Amazon Web Services cloud almost eleven years ago. The very premise of Amazon was to eliminate brick and mortar retailing, cutting out capital expenses as much as possible, to deliver books and then myriad other things to our doorsteps.

How ironic is it that Amazon pivoted to one of the most capital intensive businesses on earth – running datacenters – and has been able to extract predictable and sizable profits from it to prop up its other businesses and strengthen …

When Will AWS Move Up The Stack To Real Applications? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Riding The Coattails Of Google Kubernetes And AWS Lambda

There are individuals and companies that create whole new technologies for their own consumption and that sometimes open source them for others to help steer their development and fix their bugs. And then there are still other companies that polish these tools, giving them some enterprise fit and finish, and thereby make it possible for others to deploy a particular technology without having to have PhDs, who are not available anyway, on staff.

From the enterprise perspective, the Apache web server and related Tomcat application server needed its Big Blue, the Linux operating system needed its Red Hat, and the …

Riding The Coattails Of Google Kubernetes And AWS Lambda was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hyperscalers Ready To Run Barefoot In The Datacenter

Breaking into the switch market is not an easy task, whether you are talking about providing whole switches or just the chips that drive them. But there is always room for innovation, which is why some of the upstarts have a pretty credible chance to shake up networking, which is the last bastion of proprietary within the datacenter.

Barefoot Networks is one of the up-and-coming switch chip makers, with its “Tofino” family of ASICs that, among other things, has circuits and software that allow for the data plane – that part of the device that controls how data moves …

Hyperscalers Ready To Run Barefoot In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Relentless Yet Predictable Pace Of InfiniBand Speed Bumps

High performance computing in its various guises is not just determined by the kind and amount of computing that is made available at scale to applications. More and more, the choice of network adapters and switches as well as the software stack that links the network to applications plays an increasingly important role. And moreover, networks are comprising a larger and larger portion of the cluster budget, too.

So picking the network that lashes servers to each other and to their shared storage is important. And equally important is having a roadmap for the technology that is going to provide …

The Relentless Yet Predictable Pace Of InfiniBand Speed Bumps was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Skylake Xeon Ramp Cuts Into Intel’s Datacenter Profits

Every successive processor generation presents its own challenges to all chip makers, and the ramp of 14 nanometer processes that will be used in the future “Skylake” Xeon processors, due in the second half of this year, cut into the operating profits of its Data Center Group in the final quarter of 2016. Intel also apparently had an issue with one of its chip lines ­– it did not say if it was a Xeon or Xeon Phi, or detail what that issue was – that needed to be fixed and that hurt Data Center Group’s middle line, too.

Still, …

Skylake Xeon Ramp Cuts Into Intel’s Datacenter Profits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Reorg Forges Cognitive Systems, Merges Cloud And Analytics

It is the first month of a new year, and this is the time that IBM traditionally does reorganizations of its business lines and plays musical chairs with its executives to reconfigure itself for the coming year. And just like clockwork, late last week the top brass at Big Blue did internal announcements explaining the changes it is making to transform its wares into a platform better suited to the times.

The first big change, and one that may have precipitated all of the others that have been set in place, is Robert LeBlanc, who is the senior vice president …

IBM Reorg Forges Cognitive Systems, Merges Cloud And Analytics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Multi-Threaded Programming By Hand Versus OpenMP

For a long time now, researchers have been working on automating the process of breaking up otherwise single-threaded code to run on multiple processors by way of multiple threads. Results, although occasionally successful, eluded anything approaching a unified theory of everything.

Still, there appears to be some interesting success via OpenMP. The good thing about OpenMP is that its developers realized that what is really necessary is for the C or Fortran programmer to provide just enough hints to the compiler that say “Hey, this otherwise single-threaded loop, this sequence of code, might benefit from being split amongst multiple …

Multi-Threaded Programming By Hand Versus OpenMP was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

BSC’s Mont Blanc 3 Puts ARM Inside Bull Sequana Supers

The HPC industry has been waiting a long time for the ARM ecosystem to mature enough to yield real-world clusters, with hundreds or thousands of nodes and running a full software stack, as a credible alternative to clusters based on X86 processors. But the wait is almost over, particularly if the Mont-Blanc 3 system that will be installed by the Barcelona Supercomputer Center is any indication.

BSC has been shy about trying new architectures in its clusters, and the original Mare Nostrum super that was installed a decade ago and that ranked fifth on the Top 500 list when it …

BSC’s Mont Blanc 3 Puts ARM Inside Bull Sequana Supers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The New IBM Glass Is Almost Half Full

It takes an incredible amount of resilience for any company to make it decades, much less more than a century, in any industry. IBM has taken big risks to create new markets, first with time clocks and meat slicers and tabulating machines early in the last century, and some decades later it created the modern computer industry with the System/360 mainframe. It survived a near-death experience in the middle 1990s when the IT industry was changing faster than it was, and now it is trying to find its footing in cognitive computing and public and private clouds as its legacy …

The New IBM Glass Is Almost Half Full was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Gets Serious About Hyperconverged Storage With SimpliVity Buy

Rumors have been running around for months that Hewlett Packard Enterprise was shopping around for a way to be a bigger player in the hyperconverged storage arena, and the recent scuttlebutt was that HPE was considering paying close to $4 billion for one of the larger players in server-storage hybrids. This turns out to not be true. HPE is paying only $650 million to snap up what was, until now, thought to be one of Silicon Valley’s dozen or so unicorns with over a $1 billion valuation.

It is refreshing to see that HPE is not overpaying for an …

HPE Gets Serious About Hyperconverged Storage With SimpliVity Buy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Essence Of Multi-Threaded Applications

In the prior two articles in this series, we have gone through the theory behind programming multi-threaded applications, with the management of shared memory being accessed by multiple threads, and of even creating those threads in the first place. Now, we need to put one such multi-threaded application together and see how it works. You will find that the pieces fall together remarkably easily.

If we wanted to build a parallel application using multiple threads, we would likely first think of one where we split up a loop amongst the threads. We will be looking at such later in a …

The Essence Of Multi-Threaded Applications was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

On Premises Object Storage Mimics Big Public Clouds

Object storage is not a new concept, but this type of storage architecture is beginning to garner more attention from large organisations as they grapple with the difficulties of managing increasingly large volumes of unstructured data gathered from applications, social media, and a myriad other sources.

The properties of object-based storage systems mean that they can scale easily to handle hundreds or even thousands of petabytes of capacity if required. Throw in the fact that object storage can be less costly in terms of management overhead (somewhere around 20 percent so that means needing to buy 20 percent less capacity …

On Premises Object Storage Mimics Big Public Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Interplay Of HPC Interconnects And CPU Utilization

Choosing the right interconnect for high-performance compute and storage platforms is critical for achieving the highest possible system performance and overall return on investment.

Over time, interconnect technologies have become more sophisticated and include more intelligent capabilities (offload engines), which enable the interconnect to do more than just transferring data. Intelligent interconnect can increase system efficiency; interconnect with offload engines (offload interconnect) dramatically reduces CPU overhead, allowing more CPU cycles to be dedicated to applications and therefore enabling higher application performance and user productivity.

Today, the interconnect technology has become even more critical than ever before, due to a number …

The Interplay Of HPC Interconnects And CPU Utilization was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

What Is SMP Without Shared Memory?

This is the second in the series on the essentials of multiprocessor programming. This time around we are going to look at some of the normally little considered effects of having memory being shared by a lot of processors and by the work concurrently executing there.

We start, though, by observing that there has been quite a market for parallelizing applications even when they do not share data. There has been remarkable growth of applications capable of using multiple distributed memory systems for parallelism, and interestingly that very nicely demonstrates the opportunity that exists for using massive compute capacity …

What Is SMP Without Shared Memory? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why Google Is Driving Compute Diversity

In the ideal hyperscaler and cloud world, there would be one processor type with one server configuration and it would run any workload that could be thrown at it. Earth is not an ideal world, though, and it takes different machines to run different kinds of workloads.

In fact, if Google is any measure – and we believe that it is – then the number of different types of compute that needs to be deployed in the datacenter to run an increasingly diverse application stack is growing, not shrinking. It is the end of the General Purpose Era, which began …

Why Google Is Driving Compute Diversity was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Powers Up The Machine Architecture

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is not just a manufacturer that takes components from Intel and assembles them into systems. The company also has a heritage of innovating, and it was showing off its new datacenter architecture research and development testbed, dubbed The Machine, as 2016 came to a close.

While The Machine had originally attracted considerable attention as a vehicle for HPE to commercialize memristors, it is a much broader architectural testbed. This first generation of hardware can use any standard DDR4 DIMM-based memories, volatile or non-volatile. And while large, non-volatile memory pools are interesting research targets, HPE realizes that it …

HPE Powers Up The Machine Architecture was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Essentials Of Multiprocessor Programming

One near constant that you have been seeing in the pages of The Next Platform is that the downside of having a slowing rate at which the speed of new processors is increasing is offset by the upside of having a lot more processing elements in a device. While the performance of programs running on individual processors might not be speeding up like we might like, we instead get huge capacity increases via today’s systems by having the tens through many thousands of processors.

You have also seen in these pages that our usual vanilla view of a processor or …

The Essentials Of Multiprocessor Programming was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Arista Gives Tomahawk 25G Ethernet Some XPliant Competition

Processing for server compute has gotten more general purpose for the past two decades and is seeing resurgence in built-for-purpose chips. Network equipment makers have made their own specialized chips as well as buying merchant chips of varying kinds to meet very specific switching and routing needs.

Of the chip upstarts that are competing against industry juggernaut Cisco Systems, Arista Networks stands out as the company that decided from its founding in 2009 to rely only on merchant silicon for switches and to differentiate on speed to market and software functionality and commonality across many different switch ASICs with its …

Arista Gives Tomahawk 25G Ethernet Some XPliant Competition was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.