HPE’s Superdome Gets An SGI NUMAlink Makeover

When Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought supercomputer maker SGI back in August 2016 for $275 million, it had already invested years in creating its own “DragonHawk” chipset to build big memory Superdome X systems that were to be the follow-ons to its PA-RISC and Itanium Superdome systems. The Superdome X machines did not support HPE’s own VMS or HP-UX operating systems, but venerable Tandem NonStop fault tolerant distributed database platform was put on the road to Intel’s Xeon processors four years ago.

Now, HPE is making another leap, as we suspected it would, and anointing the SGI UV-300 platform as its …

HPE’s Superdome Gets An SGI NUMAlink Makeover was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How The Largest Tech Deal In History Might Affect Systems

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners has an appetite for tech, and securing funding for Dell to take itself private and then go out and buy EMC and VMware is now going to take a backseat in terms of deal size – and in potential ripple effects in the datacenter – now that chip giant Broadcom is making an unsolicited bid, backed by Silver Lake, to take over often-times chip rival Qualcomm.

Should this deal pass shareholder and regulatory, it could finally create a chip giant that can counterbalance Intel in the datacenter – something that Broadcom and Qualcomm both …

How The Largest Tech Deal In History Might Affect Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

For Google Networks, Predictable Latency Trumps Everything

If you want to build infrastructure that scales larger than a single image of a server and an operating system, you have no choice but to network together multiple machines. And so, the network becomes a kind of hyper backplane between compute elements and, in many cases, also a kind of virtual peripheral bus for things like disk and flash storage. From the outside, a warehouse-scale computer, as Google has been calling them for nearly a decade, is meant to look and behave like one machine even if it most certainly is not.

It is hard to quantify how …

For Google Networks, Predictable Latency Trumps Everything was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cray Looks Forward To Supercomputing Rebound

The general HPC market might be growing, and the very definition of HPC is expanding thanks to the addition of advanced analytics and machine learning to the HPC toolbox. But it is tough slogging right now in the upper echelons of HPC where supercomputers roam.

There is perhaps no better barometer of the state of supercomputing than Cray, which sells a mix of processing, storage, and interconnect technologies to address the ever-widening scope of modern supercomputing. Because of a general slowdown in supercomputer sales thanks to the fact that organizations are keeping their systems around for longer than they usually …

Cray Looks Forward To Supercomputing Rebound was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Tug Of War Between InfiniBand And Ethernet

If you want to get a microcosmic view of the epic battle between Ethernet and InfiniBand (which also includes Omni-Path no matter how much Intel protests) as they relate to high performance computing in its many modern guises, there is perhaps no better place to look at what Mellanox Technologies is selling.

Mellanox, which has been peddling InfiniBand chips, switches, and adapters since the inception of this technology, bought its biggest rival in switch sales, Voltaire, for $218 million back in November 2010. And that was perhaps its smartest move right up to the moment where the company launched …

The Tug Of War Between InfiniBand And Ethernet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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.