Why Google’s Spanner Database Won’t Do As Well As Its Clone

Google has proven time and again it is on the extreme bleeding edge of invention when it comes to scale out architectures that make supercomputers look like toys. But what would the world look like if the search engine giant had started selling capacity on its vast infrastructure back in 2005, before Amazon Web Services launched, and then shortly thereafter started selling capacity on its high level platform services? And what if it had open sourced these technologies, as it has done with the Kubernetes container controller?

The world would be surely different, and the reason it is not is …

Why Google’s Spanner Database Won’t Do As Well As Its Clone was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Tesla Compute Business Quadruples In Q4

If Nvidia’s Datacenter business unit was a startup and separate from the company, we would all be talking about the long investment it has made in GPU-based computing and how the company has moved from the blade of the hockey stick and rounded the bend and is moving rapidly up the handle with triple-digit revenue growth and an initial public offering on the horizon.

But the part of Nvidia’s business that is driven by its Tesla compute engines and GRID visualization engines is not a separate company and it is not going public. Still, that business is sure making things …

Nvidia Tesla Compute Business Quadruples In Q4 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Locking Down Docker To Open Up Enterprise Adoption

It happens time and time again with any new technology. Coders create this new thing, it gets deployed as an experiment and, if it is an open source project, shared with the world. As its utility is realized, adoption suddenly spikes with the do-it-yourself crowd that is eager to solve a particular problem. And then, as more mainstream enterprises take an interest, the talk turns to security.

It’s like being told to grow up by a grownup, to eat your vegetables. In fact, it isn’t like that at all. It is precisely that, and it is healthy for any technology …

Locking Down Docker To Open Up Enterprise Adoption was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cray Outpaces HPC Market, Books Historic Quarter

It is hard to tell which part of the systems market is lumpier – that for traditional HPC systems like supercomputers or that for massive cluster deployments for the hyperscalers that run public clouds and public facing applications on a massive scale. But what we do know for sure is that the HPC market is slowing down, and that the bellwether for that market, Cray, is doing better than that market according to its latest financial results.

Despite the softness in the traditional HPC market for clusters to run simulations and models (partly driven by the political climates around the …

Cray Outpaces HPC Market, Books Historic Quarter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Inside That Big Silicon Valley Hyperscale Supermicro Deal

Among the major companies that design and sell servers with their own brands, which are called original equipment manufacturers or OEMs, and those that co-design machines with customers and then make them, which are called original design manufacturers or ODMs, Supermicro stands apart. It does not fall precisely into either category. The company makes system components, like motherboards and enclosures, for those who want to build their own systems or those who want to sell systems to others, and it also makes complete systems, sold in onesies or twosies or sold by the hundreds of racks.

Supermicro is also a …

Inside That Big Silicon Valley Hyperscale Supermicro Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Putting ARM-Based Microservers Through The Paces

When ARM officials and partners several years ago began talking about pushing the low-power chip architecture from our phones and tablets and into the datacenter, the initial target was the emerging field of microservers – small, highly dense and highly efficient systems aimed at the growing number of cloud providers and hyperscale environments where power efficiency was as important as performance.

The thinking was that the low-power ARM architecture that was found in almost all consumer devices would fit into the energy-conscious parts of the server space that Intel was having troubling reaching with its more power-hungry Xeon processors. It …

Putting ARM-Based Microservers Through The Paces was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox

We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass.

It is with this in mind, and as more of a thought experiment than a desire, that we consider the fate of International Business Machines in the datacenter. In many ways, other companies have long …

The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A New Twist On Adding Data Persistence To Containers

Containers continue to gain momentum as organizations look for greater efficiencies and lower costs to run distributed applications in their increasingly virtualized datacenters as well as for improving their application development environments. As we have noted before, containers are becoming more common in the enterprise, though they still have a way to go before being fully embraced in high performance computing circles.

There are myriad advantages to containers, from being able to spin them up much faster than virtual machine instances on hypervisors and to pack more containers than virtual machines on a host system to gaining efficiencies …

A New Twist On Adding Data Persistence To Containers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

When Will AWS Move Up The Stack To Real Applications?

Imagine how little fun online retailer Amazon would be having on its quarterly calls if it had not launched its Amazon Web Services cloud almost eleven years ago. The very premise of Amazon was to eliminate brick and mortar retailing, cutting out capital expenses as much as possible, to deliver books and then myriad other things to our doorsteps.

How ironic is it that Amazon pivoted to one of the most capital intensive businesses on earth – running datacenters – and has been able to extract predictable and sizable profits from it to prop up its other businesses and strengthen …

When Will AWS Move Up The Stack To Real Applications? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Riding The Coattails Of Google Kubernetes And AWS Lambda

There are individuals and companies that create whole new technologies for their own consumption and that sometimes open source them for others to help steer their development and fix their bugs. And then there are still other companies that polish these tools, giving them some enterprise fit and finish, and thereby make it possible for others to deploy a particular technology without having to have PhDs, who are not available anyway, on staff.

From the enterprise perspective, the Apache web server and related Tomcat application server needed its Big Blue, the Linux operating system needed its Red Hat, and the …

Riding The Coattails Of Google Kubernetes And AWS Lambda was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hyperscalers Ready To Run Barefoot In The Datacenter

Breaking into the switch market is not an easy task, whether you are talking about providing whole switches or just the chips that drive them. But there is always room for innovation, which is why some of the upstarts have a pretty credible chance to shake up networking, which is the last bastion of proprietary within the datacenter.

Barefoot Networks is one of the up-and-coming switch chip makers, with its “Tofino” family of ASICs that, among other things, has circuits and software that allow for the data plane – that part of the device that controls how data moves …

Hyperscalers Ready To Run Barefoot In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Relentless Yet Predictable Pace Of InfiniBand Speed Bumps

High performance computing in its various guises is not just determined by the kind and amount of computing that is made available at scale to applications. More and more, the choice of network adapters and switches as well as the software stack that links the network to applications plays an increasingly important role. And moreover, networks are comprising a larger and larger portion of the cluster budget, too.

So picking the network that lashes servers to each other and to their shared storage is important. And equally important is having a roadmap for the technology that is going to provide …

The Relentless Yet Predictable Pace Of InfiniBand Speed Bumps was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Skylake Xeon Ramp Cuts Into Intel’s Datacenter Profits

Every successive processor generation presents its own challenges to all chip makers, and the ramp of 14 nanometer processes that will be used in the future “Skylake” Xeon processors, due in the second half of this year, cut into the operating profits of its Data Center Group in the final quarter of 2016. Intel also apparently had an issue with one of its chip lines ­– it did not say if it was a Xeon or Xeon Phi, or detail what that issue was – that needed to be fixed and that hurt Data Center Group’s middle line, too.

Still, …

Skylake Xeon Ramp Cuts Into Intel’s Datacenter Profits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Reorg Forges Cognitive Systems, Merges Cloud And Analytics

It is the first month of a new year, and this is the time that IBM traditionally does reorganizations of its business lines and plays musical chairs with its executives to reconfigure itself for the coming year. And just like clockwork, late last week the top brass at Big Blue did internal announcements explaining the changes it is making to transform its wares into a platform better suited to the times.

The first big change, and one that may have precipitated all of the others that have been set in place, is Robert LeBlanc, who is the senior vice president …

IBM Reorg Forges Cognitive Systems, Merges Cloud And Analytics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Multi-Threaded Programming By Hand Versus OpenMP

For a long time now, researchers have been working on automating the process of breaking up otherwise single-threaded code to run on multiple processors by way of multiple threads. Results, although occasionally successful, eluded anything approaching a unified theory of everything.

Still, there appears to be some interesting success via OpenMP. The good thing about OpenMP is that its developers realized that what is really necessary is for the C or Fortran programmer to provide just enough hints to the compiler that say “Hey, this otherwise single-threaded loop, this sequence of code, might benefit from being split amongst multiple …

Multi-Threaded Programming By Hand Versus OpenMP was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

BSC’s Mont Blanc 3 Puts ARM Inside Bull Sequana Supers

The HPC industry has been waiting a long time for the ARM ecosystem to mature enough to yield real-world clusters, with hundreds or thousands of nodes and running a full software stack, as a credible alternative to clusters based on X86 processors. But the wait is almost over, particularly if the Mont-Blanc 3 system that will be installed by the Barcelona Supercomputer Center is any indication.

BSC has been shy about trying new architectures in its clusters, and the original Mare Nostrum super that was installed a decade ago and that ranked fifth on the Top 500 list when it …

BSC’s Mont Blanc 3 Puts ARM Inside Bull Sequana Supers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The New IBM Glass Is Almost Half Full

It takes an incredible amount of resilience for any company to make it decades, much less more than a century, in any industry. IBM has taken big risks to create new markets, first with time clocks and meat slicers and tabulating machines early in the last century, and some decades later it created the modern computer industry with the System/360 mainframe. It survived a near-death experience in the middle 1990s when the IT industry was changing faster than it was, and now it is trying to find its footing in cognitive computing and public and private clouds as its legacy …

The New IBM Glass Is Almost Half Full was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Gets Serious About Hyperconverged Storage With SimpliVity Buy

Rumors have been running around for months that Hewlett Packard Enterprise was shopping around for a way to be a bigger player in the hyperconverged storage arena, and the recent scuttlebutt was that HPE was considering paying close to $4 billion for one of the larger players in server-storage hybrids. This turns out to not be true. HPE is paying only $650 million to snap up what was, until now, thought to be one of Silicon Valley’s dozen or so unicorns with over a $1 billion valuation.

It is refreshing to see that HPE is not overpaying for an …

HPE Gets Serious About Hyperconverged Storage With SimpliVity Buy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Essence Of Multi-Threaded Applications

In the prior two articles in this series, we have gone through the theory behind programming multi-threaded applications, with the management of shared memory being accessed by multiple threads, and of even creating those threads in the first place. Now, we need to put one such multi-threaded application together and see how it works. You will find that the pieces fall together remarkably easily.

If we wanted to build a parallel application using multiple threads, we would likely first think of one where we split up a loop amongst the threads. We will be looking at such later in a …

The Essence Of Multi-Threaded Applications was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

On Premises Object Storage Mimics Big Public Clouds

Object storage is not a new concept, but this type of storage architecture is beginning to garner more attention from large organisations as they grapple with the difficulties of managing increasingly large volumes of unstructured data gathered from applications, social media, and a myriad other sources.

The properties of object-based storage systems mean that they can scale easily to handle hundreds or even thousands of petabytes of capacity if required. Throw in the fact that object storage can be less costly in terms of management overhead (somewhere around 20 percent so that means needing to buy 20 percent less capacity …

On Premises Object Storage Mimics Big Public Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.