Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects

Any time a ranking of a technology is put together, that ranking is always called into question as to whether or not it is representative of reality. Rankings, such as the Top 500 list of the top supercomputers in the world, has been the subject of such debate with regards to the Linpack Fortran performance benchmark that is used to create the rankings and its relevance to the performance of actual workloads. When it comes to networking, the changes in the list in recent years are likely a better reflection of what is going on in high performance computing in …

Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

When HPC Becomes Normal

Sometimes, it seems that people are of two minds about high performance computing. They want it to be special and distinct from the rest of the broader IT market, and at the same time they want the distributed simulation and modeling workloads that have for decades been the most exotic things around to be so heavily democratized that they become pervasive. Democratized. Normal.

We are probably a few years off from HPC reaching this status, but this is one of the goals that the new HPC team at Dell has firmly in mind as the world’s second largest system maker …

When HPC Becomes Normal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Stretching Software Across Future Exascale Systems

If money was no object, then arguably the major nations of the world that always invest heavily in supercomputing would have already put an exascale class system into the field. But money always matters and ultimately supercomputers have to justify their very existence by enabling scientific breakthroughs and enhancing national security.

This, perhaps, is why the Exascale Computing Project establish by the US government last summer is taking such a measured pace in fostering the technologies that will ultimately result in bringing three exascale-class systems with two different architectures into the field after the turn of the next decade. The …

Stretching Software Across Future Exascale Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Dreaming Of 100 Exaflops In 2030

The supercomputing industry is as insatiable as it is dreamy. We have not even reached our ambitions of hitting the exascale level of performance in a single system by the end of this decade, and we are stretching our vision out to the far future and wondering how the capacity of our largest machines will scale by many orders of magnitude more.

Dreaming is the foundation of the technology industry, and supercomputing has always been where the most REM action takes place among the best and brightest minds in computing, storage, and networking – as it should be. But to …

Dreaming Of 100 Exaflops In 2030 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Oracle Takes On Xeons With Sparc S7

It is an accepted principle of modern infrastructure that at a certain scale, customization like that done by Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Baidu pays off. While Oracle is building its own public cloud, it does not have the kind of scale that these companies do, but it does have something else that warrants customization and co-design up and down its stack: more than 420,000 customers who generate $38.5 billion in sales.

This, in a nutshell, is why Oracle continues to invest in its Sparc processors even though many of its customers deploy Oracle’s middleware, database, and application software …

Oracle Takes On Xeons With Sparc S7 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Lenovo HPC Bounces Back After IBM Spinoff

When IBM sold off its System x division to Lenovo Group in the fall of 2014, some big supercomputing centers in the United States and Europe that were long-time customers of Big Blue had to stop and think about what their future systems would look like and who would supply them. It was not a foregone conclusion that the Xeon-based portion of IBM’s HPC business would just move over to Lenovo as part of the sale.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Many believed that Lenovo could not hold onto its HPC business, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell were quick …

Lenovo HPC Bounces Back After IBM Spinoff was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cisco Connects With SGI For Big NUMA Iron

When supercomputer maker SGI tweaked its NUMA server technology to try to pursue sales in the datacenter, the plan was not to go it alone but rather to partner with the makers of workhorse Xeon servers that did not – and would not – make their own big iron but who nonetheless want to sell high-end machines to their customers.

This, company officials have said all along, is the only way that SGI, which is quite a bit smaller than many of the tier one server makers, can reach the total addressable market that the company has forecast for its …

Cisco Connects With SGI For Big NUMA Iron was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Hype About Converged Systems

Converged systems are a hot commodity in the IT sector these days. But it looks to us like the hype over various kinds of integrated systems that weld servers and storage together into preconfigured stacks  including hyperconverged stacks that literally merge the compute and storage layers on the same servers – is just a bit bigger than the appetite for such iron in the datacenters of the world.

According to the latest statistics from IDC, the market for converged systems, which is a broader definition of such machines that includes integrated systems, certified reference systems, and hyperconverged systems, the market …

The Hype About Converged Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Alchemy Can’t Save Moore’s Law

We don’t have a Moore’s Law problem so much as we have a materials science or alchemy problem. If you believe in materials science, what seems abundantly clear in listening to so many discussions about the end of scale for chip manufacturing processes is that, for whatever reason, the industry as a whole has not done enough investing to discover the new materials that will allow us to enhance or move beyond CMOS chip technology.

The only logical conclusion is that people must actually believe in alchemy, that some kind of magic is going to save the day and allow …

Alchemy Can’t Save Moore’s Law was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Inside Japan’s Future Exascale ARM Supercomputer

The rumors that supercomputer maker Fujitsu would be dropping the Sparc architecture and moving to ARM cores for its next generation of supercomputers have been going around since last fall, and at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany this week, officials at the server maker and RIKEN, the research and development arm of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) that currently houses the mighty K supercomputer, confirmed that this is indeed true.

The ARM architecture now gets a heavy-hitter system maker with expertise in developing processors to support diverse commercial and technical workloads, and …

Inside Japan’s Future Exascale ARM Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC Spending Outpaces The IT Market, And Will Continue To

Sales of HPC systems were a lot brisker in 2015 than anticipated, and according to the latest prognostications from the market researchers at IDC presented from the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany this week, growth in the HPC sector will continue to outpace that of the overall IT market for many years to come.

In a sense, the good numbers that the HPC market turned in last year are perhaps a little undercounted. In his traditional early morning breakfast briefing at the conference, Earl Joseph, program vice president for high performance computing at IDC, said that he had been …

HPC Spending Outpaces The IT Market, And Will Continue To was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Knights Landing Yields Big Bang For The Buck Jump

The long wait for volume shipments of Intel’s “Knights Landing” parallel X86 processors is over, and at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany is unveiling the official lineup of the Xeon Phi chips that are aimed at high performance computing and machine learning workloads alike.

The lineup is uncharacteristically simple for a Xeon product line, which tends to have a lot of different options turned on and off to meet the myriad requirements of features and price points that a diverse customer base usually compels Intel to support. Over time, the Xeon Phi lineup will become more complex, with …

Intel Knights Landing Yields Big Bang For The Buck Jump was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

China Topples United States As Top Supercomputer User

For the first time since the Top 500 rankings of the most powerful supercomputers in the world was started 23 years ago, the United States is not home to the largest number of machines on the list – and China, after decades of intense investment and engineering, is.

Supercomputing is not just an academic or government endeavor, but it is an intensely nationalistic one given the enormous sums that are required to create the components of these massive machines, write software for them, and keep them running until some new approach comes along. And given that the machines support the …

China Topples United States As Top Supercomputer User was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Rounds Out Pascal Tesla Accelerator Lineup

Nvidia wants for its latest “Pascal” GP100 generation of GPUs to be broadly adopted in the market, not just used in capability-class supercomputers that push the limits of performance for traditional HPC workloads as well as for emerging machine learning systems. And to accomplish this, Nvidia needs to put Pascal GPUs into a number of distinct devices that fit into different system form factors and offer various capabilities at multiple price points.

At the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, Nvidia is therefore taking the wraps off two new Tesla accelerators based on the Pascal GPUs that plug into systems …

Nvidia Rounds Out Pascal Tesla Accelerator Lineup was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cavium Buys Access To Enterprise With QLogic Deal

Might doesn’t make right, but it sure does help. One of the recurring bothers about any technology upstart is that they are smaller Davids usually up against vastly larger Goliaths, usually with a broader and deeper set of technologies covering multiple markets. The best way to get traction in one market, then, seems to be to have significant footing in several markets.

This is the strategy that ARM server chip and switch ASIC maker Cavium is taking as it shells out approximately $1.36 billion to acquire network and storage switch chip maker QLogic. The combination of the two companies will …

Cavium Buys Access To Enterprise With QLogic Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Next-Gen Network Adapters: More Oomph, Switchless Clusters

There are two endpoints in any network connection, and you have to focus on both the server adapter and the switch to get the best and most balanced performance out of the network and the proper return on what amounts to be a substantial investment in a cluster.

With the upcoming ConnectX-5 server adapters, Mellanox Technologies is continuing in its drive to have more and more of the network processing in a server node offloaded to its adapter cards. And it is also rolling out significant new functionality such as background checkpointing and switchless networking, and of course there is …

Next-Gen Network Adapters: More Oomph, Switchless Clusters was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Walls Come Down On The Last Bastion Of Proprietary

Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively.

Servers have been smashed wide open in large enterprises, HPC centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders (excepting Microsoft Azure, of course) by the double whammy of the ubiquity of the X86 server and the open source Linux operating system, and storage has followed suit …

The Walls Come Down On The Last Bastion Of Proprietary was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Skylake Xeon E3s Serve Up Cheap Flops

AMD gets a lot of credit for creating Accelerated Processing Units that merge CPUs and GPUs on a single package or on a single die, but Intel also has a line of chips Core and Xeon processors that do the same thing for workstation and server workloads. The “Skylake-H” Xeon E3-1500 v5 chips that Intel recently announced with its new Iris Pro Graphics P580 GPUs pack quite a wallop. Enough in fact that for certain kinds of floating point math on hybrid workloads that system architects should probably give them consideration as they are building out clusters to do various …

Skylake Xeon E3s Serve Up Cheap Flops was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Challenge Of Coding Across HPC Architectures

With the International Supercomputing 2016 conference fast approaching, the HPC community is champing at the bit to share insights on the latest technologies and techniques to make simulation and modeling applications scale further and run faster.

The hot topic of conversation is often hardware at such conferences, but hardware is easy. Software is the hard part, and techniques for exploiting the compute throughput of an increasingly diverse collection of engines – from multicore CPUs to GPUs to DSPs and to FPGAs – evolve more slowly than hardware. And they do so by necessity.

The OpenACC group is getting out ahead …

The Challenge Of Coding Across HPC Architectures was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Systems To Morph As Memory Options Expand

Compute is by far still the largest part of the hardware budget at most IT organizations, and even with the advance of technology, which allows more compute, memory, storage, and I/O to be crammed into a server node, we still seem to always want more. But with a tighter coupling of flash in systems and new memories coming to market like 3D XPoint, the server is set to become a more complex bit of machinery.

To try to figure out what is going on out there with memory on systems in the real world and how future technologies might affect …

Systems To Morph As Memory Options Expand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.