Where Serverless And Event Driven Computing Collide

Every new paradigm of computing has its own framework, and it is the adoption of that framework that usually makes it consumable for the regular enterprises that don’t have fleets of PhDs on hand to create their own frameworks before a technology is mature.

Serverless computing – something that strikes fear in the hearts of many whose living is dependent on the vast inefficiencies that still lurk in the datacenter – and event-driven computing are two different and often associated technologies where the frameworks are still evolving.

The serverless movement, which we have discussed before in analyzing the Lambda efforts …

Where Serverless And Event Driven Computing Collide was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come

One of the reasons that the University of California at Berkeley was been a hotbed of software technology back in the 1970s and 1980s is Michael Stonebraker, who was one of the pioneers in relational database technology and one of the industry’s biggest – and most vocal – shakers and movers and one of its most prolific serial entrepreneurs.

Like other database pioneers, Stonebraker read the early relational data model papers by IBMer Edgar Codd, and in 1973 started work on the Ingres database along IBM’s own System R database, which eventually became DB2, and Oracle’s eponymous database, which entered …

How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Ironic – And Fleeting – Volatility In NVM Storage

There is no question any longer that flash memory has found its place – in fact, many places – in the datacenter, even though the debate is still raging about when or if solid state memory will eventually replace disk drives in all datacenters of the world.

Sometime between tomorrow and never is a good guess.

Flash is still a hot commodity, so much so that the slower-than-expected transition to 3D NAND has caused a shortage in supply that is driving up the price of enterprise-grade flash – unfortunately at the same time that memory makers are having trouble cranking …

The Ironic – And Fleeting – Volatility In NVM Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets

In a properly working capitalist economy, innovative companies make big bets, help create new markets, vanquish competition or at least hold it at bay, and profit from all of the hard work, cleverness, luck, and deal making that comes with supplying a good or service to demanding customers.

There is no question that Nvidia has become a textbook example of this as it helped create and is now benefitting from the wave of accelerated computing that is crashing into the datacenters of the world. The company is on a roll, and is on the very laser-sharp cutting edge of its …

Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Fujitsu Bets On Deep Leaning And HPC Divergence

One of the luckiest coincidences in the past decade has been that the hybrid machines designed for traditional HPC simulation and modeling workloads. which combined the serial processing performance of CPUs and the parallel processing and massive memory bandwidth of GPUs, we also well suited to run machine learning training applications.

If the HPC community had not made the investments in hybrid architectures, the hyperscalers and their massive machine learning operations, which drive just about all aspects of their businesses these days, would not have seen such stellar results. (And had that not happen, many of us would have had …

Fujitsu Bets On Deep Leaning And HPC Divergence was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Shape Of AMD HPC And AI Iron To Come

In the IT business, just like any other business, you have to try to sell what is on the truck, not what is planned to be coming out of the factories in the coming months and years. AMD has put a very good X86 server processor into the market for the first time in nine years, and it also has a matching GPU that gives its OEM and ODM partners a credible alternative for HPC and AI workload to the combination of Intel Xeons and Nvidia Teslas that dominate hybrid computing these days.

There are some pretty important caveats to …

The Shape Of AMD HPC And AI Iron To Come was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Drilling Down Into The Xeon Skylake Architecture

The “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel have been in the market for nearly a month now, and we thought it would be a good time to drill down into the architecture of the new processor. We also want to see what the new Xeon SP has to offer for HPC, AI, and enterprise customers as well as compare the new X86 server motor to prior generations of Xeons and alternative processors in the market that are vying for a piece of the datacenter action.

That’s a lot, and we relish it. So let’s get started with a deep dive …

Drilling Down Into The Xeon Skylake Architecture was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable

While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap.

That is why Broadcom, which still has the lion’s share of switch ASIC sales in the datacenter, has revved its long-running Trident family of chips, which lead …

Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Accelerating Deep Learning Insights With GPU-Based Systems

Explosive data growth and a rising demand for real-time analytics are making high performance computing (HPC) technologies increasingly vital to success. Organizations across all industries are seeking the next generation of IT solutions to facilitate scientific research, enhance national security, ensure economic stability, and empower innovation to face the challenges of today and tomorrow.

HPC solutions are key to quickly answering some of the world’s most daunting questions. From Tesla’s self-driving car to quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling unparalleled compute capabilities and outmatching humans at many cognitive tasks. Deep learning, an advanced AI technique, is growing in popularity …

Accelerating Deep Learning Insights With GPU-Based Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Skylake Calm Before The Compute Storm

It looks like the push to true cloud computing that many of us have been projecting for such a long time is actually coming to pass, and despite many of the misgivings that many of us have expressed about giving up control of our own datacenters and the applications that run there.

That chip giant Intel is making money as it rolls up its 14 nanometer manufacturing process ramp is not really a surprise. During the second quarter of this year, rival AMD had not yet gotten its “Naples” Epyc X86 server processors into the field, and IBM has pushed …

The Skylake Calm Before The Compute Storm was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Supercomputing Slump Hits HPC

Supercomputing, by definition, is an esoteric, exotic, and relatively small slice of the overall IT landscape, but it is, also by definition, a vital driver of innovation within IT and in all of the segments of the market where simulation, modeling, and now machine learning are used to provide goods and services.

As we have pointed out many times, the supercomputing business is not, however, one that is easy to participate in and generate a regular stream of revenues and predictable profits and it is most certainly one where the vendors and their customers have to, by necessity, take the …

The Supercomputing Slump Hits HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Oil And Gas Upstart Has No Reserves About GPUs

The oil and gas industry has been on the cutting edge of many waves of computing over the several decades that supercomputers have been used to model oil reservoirs in both the planning of the development of an oil field and in quantifying the stored reserves of a field and therefore the future possible revenue stream of the company.

Oil companies can’t see through the earth’s crust to the domes where oil has been trapped, and it is the job of reservoir engineers to eliminate as much risk as possible from the field so the oil company can be prosperous …

Oil And Gas Upstart Has No Reserves About GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Trials And Tribulations Of IBM Systems

IBM is a bit of an enigma these days. It has the art – some would say black magic – of financial engineering down pat, and its system engineering is still quite good. Big Blue talks about all of the right things for modern computing platforms, although it speaks a slightly different dialect because the company still thinks that it is the one setting the pace, and therefore coining the terms, rather than chasing markets that others are blazing. And it just can’t seem to grow revenues, even after tens of billions of dollars in acquisitions and internal investments over …

The Trials And Tribulations Of IBM Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How Google Wants To Rewire The Internet

When all of your business is driven by end users coming to use your applications over the Internet, the network is arguably the most critical part of the infrastructure. That is why search engine and ad serving giant Google, which has expanded out to media serving, hosted enterprise applications, and cloud computing, has put a tremendous amount of investment into creating its own network stack.

But running a fast, efficient, hyperscale network for internal datacenters is not sufficient for a good user experience, and that is why Google has created a software defined networking stack to do routing over the …

How Google Wants To Rewire The Internet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The System Bottleneck Shifts To PCI-Express

No matter what, system architects are always going to have to contend with one – and possibly more – bottlenecks when they design the machines that store and crunch the data that makes the world go around. These days, there is plenty of compute at their disposal, a reasonable amount of main memory to hang off of it, and both Ethernet and InfiniBand are on the cusp of 200 Gb/sec of performance and not too far away from 400 Gb/sec and even higher bandwidths.

Now, it looks like the peripheral bus based on the PCI-Express protocol is becoming the bottleneck, …

The System Bottleneck Shifts To PCI-Express was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The New Server Economies Of Scale For AMD

In the first story of this series, we discussed the Infinity fabric that is at the heart of the new “Naples” Epyc processor from AMD, and how this modified and extended HyperTransport interconnect glues together the cores, dies, and sockets based on Eypc processors into a unified system.

In this follow-on story, we will expand out from the Epyc processor design to the basic feeds and speeds of the system components based on this chip and then take a look at some of the systems that AMD and its partners were showing off at the Epyc launch a few …

The New Server Economies Of Scale For AMD was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Convergence Or Divergence Of HPC And AI Iron

Based on datacenter practices of the past two decades, it is a matter of faith that it is always better to run a large number of applications on a given set of generic infrastructure than it is to have highly tuned machines running specific workloads. Siloed applications on separate machines are a thing of the past. However, depending on how Moore’s Law progresses (or doesn’t) and how the software stacks shake out for various workloads, organizations might be running applications on systems with very different architectures, either in a siloed, standalone fashion or across a complex workflow that links the …

The Convergence Or Divergence Of HPC And AI Iron was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Heart Of AMD’s Epyc Comeback Is Infinity Fabric

At AMD’s Epyc launch few weeks ago, Lisa Su, Mark Papermaster, and the rest of the AMD Epyc team hammered home that AMD designed its new Zen processor core for servers first. This server-first approach has implications for performance, performance per watt, and cost perspectives in both datacenter and consumer markets.

AMD designed Epyc as a modular architecture around its “Zeppelin” processor die with its eight “Zen” architecture cores. To allow multi-die scalability, AMD first reworked its HyperTransport socket-to-socket system I/O architecture for use on a chip, across a multi-chip module (MCM), and for inter-socket connectivity. AMD has named this …

The Heart Of AMD’s Epyc Comeback Is Infinity Fabric was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Securing The HPC Infrastructure

In the world of high performance computing (HPC), the most popular buzzwords include speed, performance, durability, and scalability. Security is one aspect of HPC that is not often discussed, or else seems to be relatively low on the list of priorities when organizations begin building out their infrastructures to support a demanding new applications, whether for oil and gas exploration, machine learning, simulations, or visualization of complex datasets.

While IT security is paramount for businesses in the digital age, HPC systems typically do not encounter the same risks as public-facing infrastructures – in the same way as a web server …

Securing The HPC Infrastructure was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The X86 Battle Lines Drawn With Intel’s Skylake Launch

At long last, Intel’s “Skylake” converged Xeon server processors are entering the field, and the competition with AMD’s “Naples” Epyc X86 alternatives can begin and the ARM server chips from Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm and the Power9 chip from IBM know exactly what they are aiming at.

It is a good time to be negotiating with a chip maker for compute power.

The Skylake chips, which are formally known as the Xeon Scalable Processor family, are the result of the convergence of the workhorse Xeon E5 family of chips for two-socket and four-socket servers with the higher-end Xeon E7 …

The X86 Battle Lines Drawn With Intel’s Skylake Launch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.