Cray CTO On The Cambrian Compute Explosion

What goes around comes around. After fighting so hard to drive volume economics in the HPC arena with relatively inexpensive X86 clusters in the past twenty years, those economies of scale are running out of gas. That is why we are seeing an explosion in the diversity of compute, not just on the processor, but in adjunct computing elements that make a processor look smarter than it really is.

The desire of system architects to try everything because it is fun has to be counterbalanced by a desire to make systems that can be manufactured at a price that is …

Cray CTO On The Cambrian Compute Explosion was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC Poised For Big Changes, Top To Bottom

There is a lot of change coming down the pike in the high performance computing arena, but it has not happened as yet and that is reflected in the current Top 500 rankings of supercomputers in the world. But the June 2017 list gives us a glimpse into the future, which we think will be as diverse and contentious from an architectural standpoint as in the past.

No one architecture is winning and taking all, and many different architectures are getting a piece of the budget action. This means HPC is a healthy and vibrant ecosystem and not, like enterprise …

HPC Poised For Big Changes, Top To Bottom was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Memory Scalability At The Heart Of The Machine

Much has been made of the ability of The Machine, the system with the novel silicon photonics interconnect and massively scalable shared memory pool being developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to already address more main memory at once across many compute elements than many big iron NUMA servers. With the latest prototype, which was unveiled last month, the company was able to address a whopping 160 TB of DDR4 memory.

This is a considerable feat, but HPE has the ability to significantly expand the memory addressability of the platform, using both standard DRAM memory and as lower cost memories such …

The Memory Scalability At The Heart Of The Machine was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Clever RDMA Technique Delivers Distributed Memory Pooling

More databases and data stores and the applications that run atop them are moving to in-memory processing, and sometimes the memory capacity in a single big iron NUMA server isn’t enough and the latencies across a cluster of smaller nodes are too high for decent performance.

For example, server memory capacity tops out at 48 TB in the Superdome X server and at 64 TB in the UV 300 server from Hewlett Packard Enterprise using NUMA architectures. HPE’s latest iteration of the The Machine packs 160 TB of shared memory capacity across its nodes, and has an early version of …

Clever RDMA Technique Delivers Distributed Memory Pooling was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Composable Systems Wave Is Rising

Hardware is, by its very nature, physical and therefore, unlike software or virtual hardware and software routines encoded by FPGAs, it is the one thing that cannot be easily changed. The dream of composable systems, which we have discussed in the past, is something that has been swirling around in the heads of system architects for more than a decade, and we are without question getting closer to realizing the dream of making the components of systems and the clusters that are created from them programmable like software.

The hyperscalers, of course, have been on the bleeding edge of …

The Composable Systems Wave Is Rising was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

One Hyperscaler Gets The Jump On Skylake, Everyone Else Sidelined

Well, it could have been a lot worse. About 5.6 percent worse, if you do the math.

As we here at The Next Platform have been anticipating for quite some time, with so many stars aligning here in 2017 and a slew of server processor and GPU coprocessor announcements and deliveries expected starting in the summer and rolling into the fall, there is indeed a slowdown in the server market and one that savvy customers might be able to take advantage of. But we thought those on the bleeding edge of performance were going to wait to see what Intel, …

One Hyperscaler Gets The Jump On Skylake, Everyone Else Sidelined was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

When No One Can Make Money In Systems

Making money in the information technology market has always been a challenge, but it keeps getting increasingly difficult as the tumultuous change in how companies consume compute, storage, and networking rips through all aspects of this $3 trillion market.

It is tough to know exactly what do to, and we see companies chasing the hot new things, doing acquisitions to bolster their positions, and selling off legacy businesses to generate the cash to do the deals and to keep Wall Street at bay. Companies like IBM, Dell, HPE, and Lenovo have sold things off and bought other things to try …

When No One Can Make Money In Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Memory-Like Storage Means File Systems Must Change

The term software defined storage is in the new job title that Eric Barton has at DataDirect Networks, and he is a bit amused by this. As one of the creators of early parallel file systems for supercomputers and one of the people who took the Lustre file systems from a handful of supercomputing centers to one of the two main data management platforms for high performance computing, to a certain way of looking at it, Barton has always been doing software-defined storage.

The world has just caught up with the idea.

Now Barton, who is leaving Intel in the …

Memory-Like Storage Means File Systems Must Change was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Last Itanium, At Long Last

In a world of survival of the fittest coupled with mutations, something always has to be the last of its kind. And so it is with the “Kittson” Itanium 9700 processors, which Intel quietly released earlier this month and which will mostly see action in the last of the Integrity line of midrange and high-end systems from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The Itanium line has a complex history, perhaps fitting for a computing architecture that was evolving from the 32-bit X86 architecture inside of Intel and that was taken in a much more experimental and bold direction when the aspiring server …

The Last Itanium, At Long Last was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Under The Hood Of Google’s TPU2 Machine Learning Clusters

As we previously reported, Google unveiled its second-generation TensorFlow Processing Unit (TPU2) at Google I/O last week. Google calls this new generation “Google Cloud TPUs”, but provided very little information about the TPU2 chip and the systems that use it other than to provide a few colorful photos. Pictures do say more than words, so in this article we will dig into the photos and provide our thoughts based the pictures and on the few bits of detail Google did provide.

To start with, it is unlikely that Google will sell TPU-based chips, boards, or servers – TPU2 …

Under The Hood Of Google’s TPU2 Machine Learning Clusters was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Big Bang For The Buck Jump With Volta DGX-1

One of the reasons why Nvidia has been able to quadruple revenues for its Tesla accelerators in recent quarters is that it doesn’t just sell raw accelerators as well as PCI-Express cards, but has become a system vendor in its own right through its DGX-1 server line. The company has also engineered new adapter cards specifically aimed at hyperscalers who want to crank up the performance on their machine learning inference workloads with a cheaper and cooler Volts GPU.

Nvidia does not break out revenues for the DGX-1 line separately from other Tesla and GRID accelerator product sales, but we …

Big Bang For The Buck Jump With Volta DGX-1 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AMD Disrupts The Two-Socket Server Status Quo

It is funny to think that Advanced Micro Devices has been around almost as long as the IBM System/360 mainframe and that it has been around since the United States landed people on the moon. The company has gone through many gut-wrenching transformations, adapting to changing markets. Like IBM and Apple, just to name two, AMD has had its share of disappointments and near-death experiences, but unlike Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Sequent Computer, Data General, Tandem Computer, and Digital Equipment, it has managed to stay independent and live to fight another day.

AMD wants a second chance in the datacenter, …

AMD Disrupts The Two-Socket Server Status Quo was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute

We are still chewing through all of the announcements and talk at the GPU Technology Conference that Nvidia hosted in its San Jose stomping grounds last week, and as such we are thinking about the much bigger role that graphics processors are playing in datacenter compute – a realm that has seen five decades of dominance by central processors of one form or another.

That is how CPUs got their name, after all. And perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone that systems used to be a collection of different kinds of compute, and that is why the …

The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia’s Tesla Volta GPU Is The Beast Of The Datacenter

Graphics chip maker Nvidia has taken more than a year and carefully and methodically transformed its GPUs into the compute engines for modern HPC, machine learning, and database workloads. To do so has meant staying on the cutting edge of many technologies, and with the much-anticipated but not very long-awaited “Volta” GP100 GPUs, the company is once again skating on the bleeding edge of several different technologies.

This aggressive strategy allows Nvidia to push the performance envelope on GPUs and therefore maintain its lead over CPUs for the parallel workloads it is targeting while at the same time setting up …

Nvidia’s Tesla Volta GPU Is The Beast Of The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

GOAI: Keeping Databases, Analytics, And Machine Learning All On The GPU

Moving data is the biggest problem in computing, and probably has been since there was data processing if we really want to be honest about it. Because of the cost of bandwidth, latency, energy, and iron to do multiple stages of processing on information in a modern application that might include a database as well as machine learning algorithms against stuff stored there as well as from other sources, you want to try to do all your computation from the memory of one set of devices.

That, in a nutshell, is what the GPU Open Analytics Initiative is laying the …

GOAI: Keeping Databases, Analytics, And Machine Learning All On The GPU was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays

There may be a shortage in the supply of DRAM main memory and NAND flash memory that is having an adverse effect on the server and storage markets, but there is no shortage of vendors who are trying to push the envelope on clustered storage using a mix of these memories and others such as the impending 3D XPoint.

Micron Technology, which makes and sells all three of these types of memories, is so impatient with the rate of technological advancement in clustered flash arrays based on the NVM-Express protocol that it decided to engineer and launch its own product …

Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Crunching Machine Learning And Databases Together On GPUs

While it is always best to have the right tool for the job, it is better still if a tool can be used by multiple jobs and therefore have its utilization be higher than it might otherwise be. This is one of the reasons why general purpose, X86-based computing took over the datacenter. Economies of scale trumped the efficiency that can come from limited scope or just leaving legacy applications alone in place on alternate platforms.

The idea of offloading computational tasks from CPUs to GPU accelerators took off in academia a little more than a decade ago, and …

Crunching Machine Learning And Databases Together On GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand

Enterprise spending on servers was a bit soft in the first quarter, as evidenced by the financial results posted by Intel and by its sometime rival IBM, but the hyperscale and HPC markets, at least when it comes to networking, was a bit soft, according to high-end network chip and equipment maker Mellanox Technologies.

In the first quarter ended March 31, Mellanox had a 4.1 percent revenue decline, to $188.7 million, and because of higher research and development costs, presumably associated with the rollout of 200 Gb/sec Quantum InfiniBand technology (which the company has talked about) and …

HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance

Energy efficiency and operating costs for systems are as important as raw performance in today’s datacenters. Everyone from the largest hyperscalers and high performance computing centers to large enterprises that are sometimes like them are trying squeeze as much performance as they can from their infrastructure while reining in power consumption and the costs associated with keeping it all from overheating.

Throw in the slowing down of Moore’s Law and new emerging workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the challenge to these organizations becomes apparent.

In response, organizations on the cutting edge have embraced accelerators like GPUs and …

Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Melds Xeon E5 And E7 With Skylake

We have been saying for the past two year that the impending “Skylake” Xeon processors represented the biggest platform architectural change in the Xeon processor business at Intel since the transformational “Nehalem” Xeon 5500s that debuted back in March 2009 into the gaping maw of the Great Recession.

There is no global recession breathing down the IT sector’s neck like a hungry wolf here in 2017, eight years and seven chip generations later. But Intel is facing competitive pressures from AMD’s Naples Opterons, IBM’s Power9, and the ARM collective (mainly Cavium and Qualcomm at this point, but Applied Micro is …

Intel Melds Xeon E5 And E7 With Skylake was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.