Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Timothy Prickett Morgan
How Nvidia’s Own Saturn V DGX-1 Cluster Stacks Up
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.
IBM Shows Off AI And HPC Oomph On Power8 Tesla Hybrids
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.
Pascal GPUs On All Fronts Push Nvidia To New Highs
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.
InfiniBand Breaks Through The 200G Barrier
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.
Getting Hyper About Converged Storage, And Then Some
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.
DDN Turns The Crank On “Wolfcreek” Storage
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.
Google Wants Kubernetes To Rule The World
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.
Chasing The Dream Of Code HPC Once, Run Anywhere
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.
Building The Stack Above And Below OpenStack
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.
Getting Agile And Staying That Way
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.
Cisco Drives Density With S Series Storage Server
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.
Microsoft Azure Goes Back To Rack Servers With Project Olympus
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.
Broadcom Strikes 100G Ethernet Harder With Tomahawk-II
Because space costs so much money and having multiple machines adds complexity and even more costs on top of that, there is always pressure to increase the density of the devices that provide compute, storage, and networking capacity in the datacenter. Moore’s Law, in essence, doesn’t just drive chips, but also the devices that are comprised of chips.
Often, it is the second or third iteration of a technology that takes off because the economics and density of the initial products can’t match the space and power constraints of a system rack. Such was the case with the initial 100 …
Broadcom Strikes 100G Ethernet Harder With Tomahawk-II was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution
Making storage cheaper on the cloud does not necessarily mean using tape or Blu-Ray discs to hold data. In a datacenter that has enormous bandwidth and consistent latency over a Clos network interconnecting hundreds of thousands of compute and storage servers, and by changing the durability and availability of data on the network and trading off storage costs and data access and movement costs, a hyperscaler can offer a mix of price and performance and cut costs.
That, in a nutshell, is what search engine giant and public cloud provider Google is doing with the latest variant of persistent storage …
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution
Making storage cheaper on the cloud does not necessarily mean using tape or Blu-Ray discs to hold data. In a datacenter that has enormous bandwidth and consistent latency over a Clos network interconnecting hundreds of thousands of compute and storage servers, and by changing the durability and availability of data on the network and trading off storage costs and data access and movement costs, a hyperscaler can offer a mix of price and performance and cut costs.
That, in a nutshell, is what search engine giant and public cloud provider Google is doing with the latest variant of persistent storage …
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There
Earlier this month, Samsung acquired Viv, the AI platform built by the creators of Siri that seeks to “open up the world of AI assistants to all developers.” The acquisition was largely overshadowed by the more high-profile news of Samsung’s struggles with its Galaxy Note smartphone, but make no mistake, this was a bold and impactful move by Samsung that aggressively launches the company into the future of smart, AI-enabled devices.
Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus makes a compelling argument for why Samsung’s ecosystem serves as an invaluable launching pad for Viv’s goal of ubiquity – the electronics giant’s …
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There
Earlier this month, Samsung acquired Viv, the AI platform built by the creators of Siri that seeks to “open up the world of AI assistants to all developers.” The acquisition was largely overshadowed by the more high-profile news of Samsung’s struggles with its Galaxy Note smartphone, but make no mistake, this was a bold and impactful move by Samsung that aggressively launches the company into the future of smart, AI-enabled devices.
Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus makes a compelling argument for why Samsung’s ecosystem serves as an invaluable launching pad for Viv’s goal of ubiquity – the electronics giant’s …
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades
What happens to the datacenter when a trillion devices embedded in every manner of product and facility are chatting away with each other, trying to optimize the world? There is a very good chance that the raw amount of computing needed to chew on that data at the edge, in the middle, and in a datacenter – yes, we will still have datacenters – will absolutely explode.
The supply chain for datacenters – including the ARM collective — is absolutely counting on exponential growth in sensors, which ARM Holding’s top brass and its new owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, spent …
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades
What happens to the datacenter when a trillion devices embedded in every manner of product and facility are chatting away with each other, trying to optimize the world? There is a very good chance that the raw amount of computing needed to chew on that data at the edge, in the middle, and in a datacenter – yes, we will still have datacenters – will absolutely explode.
The supply chain for datacenters – including the ARM collective — is absolutely counting on exponential growth in sensors, which ARM Holding’s top brass and its new owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, spent …
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool
The gap in the appetite for new computing technology between enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders is widening, but no one is talking about causality quite yet even though there is probably some link between the rise of clouds and more conservative spending on the part of enterprises.
But there is, perhaps, another cause. It could just be that the growth in traditional computing in the enterprise that is dedicated to things like print, file, web, email, and database serving is now less than the Moore’s Law increases that are enabled by process shrinks at the fabs run by Intel. …
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.