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.

Ethernet Getting Back On The Moore’s Law Track

It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the most, Ethernet got a little stuck in the mud.

But Ethernet has pulls out of its boots and left them in the swamp and is back to being barefoot again on much more solid ground where it can run faster. The move from 10 Gb/sec …

Ethernet Getting Back On The Moore’s Law Track was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Using The Network To Break Down Server Silos

Virtual machines and virtual network functions, or VMs and VNFs for short, are the standard compute units in modern enterprise, cloud, and telecommunications datacenters. But varying VM and VNF resource needs as well as networking and security requirements often force IT departments to manage servers in separate silos, each with their own respective capabilities.

For example, some VMs or VNFs may require a moderate number of vCPU cores and lower I/O bandwidth, while VMs and VNFs associated with real-time voice and video, IoT, and telco applications require a moderate-to-high number of vCPU cores, rich networking services, and high I/O bandwidth, …

Using The Network To Break Down Server Silos was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

InfiniBand And Proprietary Networks Still Rule Real HPC

With the network comprising as much as a quarter of the cost of a high performance computing system and being absolutely central to the performance of applications running on parallel systems, it is fair to say that the choice of network is at least as important as the choice of compute engine and storage hierarchy. That’s why we like to take a deep dive into the networking trends present in each iteration of the Top 500 supercomputer rankings as they come out.

It has been a long time since the Top 500 gave a snapshot of pure HPC centers that …

InfiniBand And Proprietary Networks Still Rule Real HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Fix Your NAS With Metadata

Enterprises are purchasing storage by the truckload to support an explosion of data in the datacenter. IDC reports that in the first quarter of 2017, total capacity shipments were up 41.4 percent year-over-year and reached 50.1 exabytes of storage capacity shipped. As IT departments continue to increase their spending on capacity, few realize that their existing storage is a pile of gold that can be fully utilized once enterprises overcome the inefficiencies created by storage silos.

A metadata engine can virtualize the view of data for an application by separating the data (physical) path from the metadata (logical) path. This …

Fix Your NAS With Metadata was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Giving Out Grades For Exascale Efforts

Just by being the chief architect of the IBM’s BlueGene massively parallel supercomputer, which was built as part of a protein folding simulation grand challenge effort undertaken by IBM in the late 1990s, Al Gara would be someone whom the HPC community would listen to whenever he spoke. But Gara is now an Intel Fellow and also chief exascale architect at Intel, which has emerged as the second dominant supplier of supercomputer architectures alongside Big Blue’s OpenPower partnership with founding members Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Google.

It may seem ironic that Gara did not stay around IBM to help this …

Giving Out Grades For Exascale Efforts was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Casing The HPC Market Is Hard, And Getting Harder

Markets are always changing. Sometimes information technology is replaced by a new thing, and sometimes it morphs from one thing to another so gradually that is just becomes computing or networking or storage as we know it. For instance, in the broadest sense, all infrastructure will be cloudy, even if it is bare metal machines or those using containers or heavier server virtualization. In a similar way, in the future all high performance computing may largely be a kind of artificial intelligence, bearing little resemblance to the crunch-heavy simulations we are used to.

It has taken two decades for cloud …

Casing The HPC Market Is Hard, And Getting Harder was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Thinking Through The Cognitive HPC Nexus With Big Blue

There are plenty of things that the members of the high performance community do not agree on, there is a growing consensus that machine learning applications will at least in some way be part of the workflow at HPC centers that do traditional simulation and modeling.

Some HPC vendors think the HPC and AI systems have either already converged or will soon do so, and others think that the performance demands (both in terms of scale and in time to result) on both HPC and AI will necessitate radically different architectures and therefore distinct systems for these two workloads. IBM, …

Thinking Through The Cognitive HPC Nexus With Big Blue was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Competition Returns To X86 Servers In Epyc Fashion

AMD has been absent from the X86 server market for so long that many of us have gotten into the habit of only speaking about the Xeon server space and how it relates to the relatively modest (in terms of market share, not in terms of architecture and capability) competition that Intel has faced in the past eight years.

Those days are over now that AMD has successfully got its first X86 server chip out the door with the launch of the “Naples” chip, the first in a line of processors that will carry the Epyc brand and, if all …

Competition Returns To X86 Servers In Epyc Fashion was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AMD Winds Up One-Two Compute Punch For Servers

While AMD voluntarily exited the server processor arena in the wake of Intel’s onslaught with the “Nehalem” Xeon processors during the Great Recession, it never stopped innovating with its graphics processors and it kept enough of a hand in smaller processors used in consumer and selected embedded devices to start making money again in PCs and to take the game console business away from IBM’s Power chip division.

Now, after five long years of investing, AMD is poised to get its act together and to storm the glass house with a new line of server processors based on its Zen …

AMD Winds Up One-Two Compute Punch For Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.