Author Archives: Timothy Prickett Morgan
Author Archives: Timothy Prickett Morgan
SGI has always had scalable technology that should have been deployed more broadly in the academic, government, and enterprise datacenters of the world. But fighting for those budget dollars at the high end of the market always came down to needing more feet on the street, a larger global footprint for service and support, and broader certification of software stacks to exploit that SGI iron.
Now that Hewlett Packard Enterprise owns SGI – or more precisely, owns its operations in the United States and will finish off its acquisition, announced in August, probably sometime in the middle of next …
HPE Takes On The High End With SGI Expertise was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The ultimate success of any platform depends on the seamless integration of diverse components into a synergistic whole – well, as much as is possible in the real world – while at the same time being flexible enough to allow for components to be swapped out and replaced by others to suit personal preferences.
Is OpenHPC, the open source software stack aimed at simulation and modeling workloads that was spearheaded by Intel a year ago, going to be the dominant and unifying platform for high performance computing? Will OpenHPC be analogous to the Linux distributions that grew up around …
OpenHPC Pedal Put To The Compute Metal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
At this point in the 21st Century, a surprisingly large portion of the manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, marketing, and retailing of every good and service known to humankind is dependent on a piece of circuit board with two Xeon processors welded to it, wrapped in some bent sheet metal with a few blinky lights peeking out of the darkness.
Back in 1885, as the United States was beginning its rise to power, Reverend Josiah Strong declared in his populist book, Our Country: “As America goes, so goes the world.” National borders and national interests still exist, but networks cross boundaries …
As The Server Goes, So Goes The World was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The future “Summit” pre-exascale supercomputer that is being built out in late 2017 and early 2018 for the US Department of Energy for its Oak Ridge National Laboratory looks like a giant cluster of systems that might be used for training neural networks. And that is an extremely convenient development.
More than once during the SC16 supercomputing conference this week in Salt Lake City, the Summit system and its companion “Sierra” system that will be deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, were referred to as “AI supercomputers.” This is a reflection of the fact that the national labs around the …
Details Emerge On “Summit” Power Tesla AI Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It is hard to tell which part of the HPC market is more competitive: compute, networking, or storage. From where we sit, there is an increasing level of competition on all three fronts and the pressure to perform, both financially and technically, has never been higher. This is great for customers, of course, who are being presented with lots of technology to choose from. But HPC customers tend to pick architectures for several generations, so there is also pressure on them to make the right choices – whatever that means.
In a sense, enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders, who …
Networks Drive HPC Harder Than Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Every new hardware device that offers some kind of benefit compared to legacy devices faces the task of overcoming the immense inertia that is imparted to a platform by the software that runs upon it. While FPGAs have so many benefits compared to general purpose CPUs and even GPUs because of their malleability, the inertia seems even heavier.
Any substantial change requires a big payoff to be implemented because change is inherently risky. It doesn’t help that the method of programming FPGAs efficiently using VHDL and Verilog are so alien to Java and C programmers, and that the tools for …
Stacking Up Software To Drive FPGAs Into The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
With most of the year finished and a new one coming up fast, and a slew of new compute and networking technologies ramping for the past year and more on the horizon for a very exciting 2017, now is the natural time to take stock of what has happened in the HPC business and what is expected to happen in the coming years.
The theme of the SC16 supercomputing conference this year is that HPC matters, and of course, we have all known this since the first such machines were distinct from enterprise-class electronic computers back in the 1960s. HPC …
The Business Of HPC Is Evolving was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
With the “Skylake” Xeon E5 v5 processors not slated until the middle of next year and the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors and Omni-Path interconnect still ramping after entering the HPC space a year ago, there are no blockbuster announcements coming out of Intel this year at the SC16 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City. But there are some goodies for HPC shops that were unveiled at the event and the chip giant also set the stage for big changes in the coming year in both traditional HPC and its younger and fast-growing sibling, machine learning.
Speaking ahead of the …
Intel Sets Up Skylake Xeon For HPC, Knights Mill Xeon Phi For AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Not all of the new and interesting high performance computing systems are always in the upper echelons of the Top 500 supercomputing list, which was announced at the opening of the SC16 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City this week. Sometimes, an intriguing system breaks into the list outside of the top ten or twenty most powerful machines in the bi-annual rankings of number-crunching performance, and such is the case with the new “Saturn V” supercomputer built by Nvidia using its latest GPUs and interconnects.
The Saturn V system, nick-named of course for the NASA launch vehicle that eventually …
How Nvidia’s Own Saturn V DGX-1 Cluster Stacks Up was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
While the machine learning applications created by hyperscalers and the simulations and models run by HPC centers are very different animals, the kinds of hardware that help accelerate the performance for one is also helping to boost the other in many cases. And that means that the total addressable market for systems like the latest GPU-accelerated Power Systems machines or the alternatives from Nvidia and others has rapidly expanded as enterprises try to deploy both HPC and AI to better run their businesses.
HPC as we know it has obviously been around for a long time, and is in a …
IBM Shows Off AI And HPC Oomph On Power8 Tesla Hybrids was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Chip maker Nvidia was founded by people who loved gaming and who wanted to make better 3D graphics cards, and decades later, the company has become a force in computing, first in HPC and then in machine learning and now database acceleration. And it all works together, with gaming graphics providing the foundation on which Nvidia can build a considerable compute business, much as Intel’s PC business provided the foundation for its Xeon assault on the datacenter over the past two and a half decades.
At some point, Nvidia may not need an explicit link to PC graphics and gaming …
Pascal GPUs On All Fronts Push Nvidia To New Highs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Moore’s Law may be slowing down performance increases in compute capacity, but InfiniBand networking did not get the memo. Mellanox Technologies has actually picked up the pace, in fact, and is previewing 200 Gb/sec InfiniBand switches and server adapters that are timed to come to market with a slew of Xeon, Opteron, ARM, and Power processors due around the middle of next year.
The new Quantum InfiniBand switch ASIC and its companion ConnextX-6 adapter ASICs come relatively hot on the heels of the 100 Gb/sec Enhanced Data Rate, or EDR, products that were announced in the fall of 2014 and …
InfiniBand Breaks Through The 200G Barrier was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
There is no question that information technology is always too complex, and that people have been complaining about this for over five decades now. It keeps us employed, so perhaps we should not point this out, and moreover, perhaps we should not be so eager to automate ourselves out of jobs. But if the advance of computing from mainframes to artificial intelligence teach us anything, it is that we always want to make IT simpler to get people out of the way of doing business or research.
The founders of hyperconverged systems maker Nutanix learned its lessons from hyperscalers like …
Getting Hyper About Converged Storage, And Then Some was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In the high performance computing arena, the stress is always on performance. Anything and everything that can be done to try to make data retrieval and processing faster ultimately adds up to better simulations and models that more accurately reflect the reality we are trying to recreate and often cast forward in time to figure out what will happen next.
Pushing performance is an interesting challenge here at the beginning of the 21st century, since a lot of server and storage components are commoditized and therefore available to others. The real engineering is coming up with innovative ways of putting …
DDN Turns The Crank On “Wolfcreek” Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
At some point, all of the big public cloud providers will have to eat their own dog food, as the parlance goes, and run their applications atop the cloudy version of their infrastructure that they sell to other people, not distinct and sometimes legacy systems that predate the ascent of their clouds. In this regard, none of the cloud providers are any different from any major enterprise or government agency that struggles with any kind of legacy system.
Search engine and online advertising giant Google wants its Cloud Platform business to compete against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and …
Google Wants Kubernetes To Rule The World was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In many ways, enterprises and hyperscalers have it easy. Very quickly in the wake of its announcement more than two decades ago, the Java programming language, a kind of virtualized C++, became the de facto standard for coding enterprise applications that run the business. And a slew of innovative storage and data analytics applications that have transformed computing were created by hyperscalers in Java and often open sourced so enterprises could use them.
The HPC community – and it is probably more accurate to say the many HPC communities – has it a bit tougher because they use a variety …
Chasing The Dream Of Code HPC Once, Run Anywhere was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It has been six years now since the “Austin” release of the OpenStack cloud controller was released by the partnership of Rackspace Hosting, which contributed its Swift object storage, and NASA, which contributed its Nova compute controller. NASA was frustrated by the open source Eucalyptus cloud controller, which was not completely open source and which did not add features fast enough, and Rackspace was in a fight for mindshare and marketshare against much larger cloud rival Amazon Web Services and wanted to leverage both open source and community to push back against its much larger rival.
OpenStack may not have …
Building The Stack Above And Below OpenStack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Let’s be honest. Although the old saying “slow and steady wins the race” may be a lesson that helps us get through school, it isn’t a realistic credo for the unrelenting demands of today’s fast-paced businesses. Faster may be better, but only if quality doesn’t suffer – and this puts immense strain on agile organizations that must continually deliver new features and software to their customers.
Meeting these needs, and doing so with efficiency, requires rethinking how we view application development and operations. For organizations embracing and addressing these challenges, the pursuit of DevOps is the new normal, but it …
Getting Agile And Staying That Way was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Getting the ratio of compute to storage right is not something that is easy within a single server design. Some workloads are wrestling with either more bits of data or heavier file types (like video), and the amount of capacity required per given unit of compute is much higher than can fit in a standard 2U machine with either a dozen large 3.5-inch drives or two dozen 2.5-inch drives.
To attack these use cases, Cisco Systems is tweaking a storage-dense machine it debuted two years ago, and equipping it with some of the System Link virtualization technologies that it created …
Cisco Drives Density With S Series Storage Server was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The thing we hear time and time again from the hyperscalers is that technology is a differentiator, but supply chain can make or break them. Designing servers, storage, switching, and datacenters is fun, but if all of the pieces can’t be brought together at volume, and at a price that is the best in the industry, then their operations can’t scale.
It is with this in mind that we ponder Microsoft’s new “Project Olympus” hyperscale servers, which it debuted today at the Zettastructure conference in London. Or, to be more precise, the hyperscale server designs that it has created but …
Microsoft Azure Goes Back To Rack Servers With Project Olympus was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.