Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs

No one knows for sure how pervasive deep learning and artificial intelligence are in the aggregate across all of the datacenters in the world, but what we do know is that the use of these techniques is growing and could represent a big chunk of the processing that gets done every millisecond of every day.

We spend a lot of time thinking about such things, and as Nvidia was getting ready to launch its new Tesla P4 and P40 GPU accelerator cards, we asked Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia just how much computing could be devoted …

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Surfing On Tech Waves With Supermicro

If money were no object and accountants allowed companies to write off investments in systems instantly, then datacenters would be tossing hardware into the scrap heap as soon as new technology came along. But in the real world, companies have to take a more measured approach to adding new systems and upgrading old ones, and that can make the time when customers buy shiny new boxes a bit tough to predict.

Forecasting sales and trying to close them are two of the many challenges that all server, storage, and switching vendors face, and Supermicro, which straddles the line between the …

Surfing On Tech Waves With Supermicro was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Trims Back To The Core Enterprise Essentials

The Hewlett Packard that Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd created through aspiration and acquisition is hardly recognizable in the increasingly streamlined Hewlett Packard Enterprise that Meg Whitman is whittling.

We joked earlier this week that with its acquisition of VMware and EMC and the sales of its outsourcing and software businesses that the new Dell was stop trying to be the old IBM. Well, the same is true of the new HP. It is not clear when and if Oracle will get the same memo, but it seems content to build engineered systems, from top to bottom, and we …

HPE Trims Back To The Core Enterprise Essentials was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The New Dell Stops Trying To Be The Old IBM

It is week one of the new Dell Technologies, the conglomerate glued together with $60 billion from the remaining parts of the old Dell it has not sold off to raise cash to buy storage giant EMC and therefore server virtualization juggernaut VMware, which is owned mostly by EMC but remains a public company in the wake of the deal.

By adding EMC and VMware to itself and shedding its outsourcing services and software business units, Dell is becoming the largest supplier of IT gear in the world, at least by its own reckoning. You could argue that consumer PCs …

The New Dell Stops Trying To Be The Old IBM was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Refreshed IBM Power Linux Systems Add NVLink

The very first systems that allow for GPUs to be hooked directly to CPUs using Nvidia’s NVLink high-speed interconnect are coming to market now that Big Blue is updating its Power Systems LC line of Linux-based systems with the help of hardware partners in the OpenPower Foundation collective.

Interestingly, the advent of the Power Systems S822LC for HPC system, code-named “Minsky” inside of IBM because human beings like real names even if marketeers are not allowed to, gives the DGX-1 machine crafted by Nvidia for deep learning workloads some competition. Right now, these systems are the only two machines on …

Refreshed IBM Power Linux Systems Add NVLink was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Vast Potential For VMware’s OpenStack Cloud

While hyperscalers and HPC centers like the bleeding edge – their very existence commands that they be on it – enterprises are a more conservative lot. No IT supplier ever went broke counting on enterprises to be risk adverse, but plenty of companies have gone the way of all flesh by not innovating enough and not seeing market inflections when they exist.

VMware, the virtualization division of the new Dell Technologies empire that formally comes into being this week, does not want to miss such changes and very much wants to continue to extract revenues and profits from its impressively …

The Vast Potential For VMware’s OpenStack Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Exascale Might Prove To Be More Than A Grand Challenge

The supercomputing industry is accustomed to 1,000X performance strides, and that is because people like to think in big round numbers and bold concepts. Every leap in performance is exciting not just because of the engineering challenges in bringing systems with kilo, mega, tera, peta, and exa scales into being, but because of the science that is enabled by such increasingly massive machines.

But every leap is getting a bit more difficult as imagination meets up with the constraints of budgets and the laws of physics. The exascale leap is proving to be particularly difficult, and not just because it …

Exascale Might Prove To Be More Than A Grand Challenge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Big Data Rides Up The Cloud Abstraction Wave

There is no workload in the datacenter that can’t, in theory and in practice, be supplied as a service from a public cloud. Big Data as a Service, or BDaaS for short, is an emerging category of services that delivers data processing for analytics in the cloud and it is getting a lot of buzz these days – and for good reason. These BDaaS products vary in features, functions, and target use cases, but all address the same basic problem: Big data and data warehousing in the cloud is deceptively challenging and customers want to abstract away the complexity.

Data …

Big Data Rides Up The Cloud Abstraction Wave was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

VMware’s Embrace And Extend Strategy

The most successful players in the information technology space are those that can adapt, again and again, to tumultuous change. With a vast installed base and plenty of technical talent, it is unwise to count VMware out as the enterprise customers who have embraces its server virtualization tools ponder how they want to evolve to something that looks more like what a hyperscaler would build.

Many companies have faced these moments, but here is perhaps a pertinent parallel.

IBM’s vaunted mainframe business reacted successfully to the onslaught of minicomputers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, spearheaded by Digital Equipment …

VMware’s Embrace And Extend Strategy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Details Emerge On China’s 64-Core ARM Chip

While the world awaits the AMD K12 and Qualcomm Hydra ARM server chips to join the ranks of the Applied Micro X-Gene and Cavium ThunderX processors already in the market, it could be upstart Chinese chip maker Phytium Technology that gets a brawny chip into the field first and also gets traction among actual datacenter server customers, not just tire kickers.

Phytium was on hand at last week’s Hot Chips 28 conference, showing off its chippery and laptop, desktop and server machines employing its “Earth” and “Mars” FT series of ARM chips. Most of the interest that people showed in …

Details Emerge On China’s 64-Core ARM Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Inside VMware Before It Dons The Dell Invisibility Cloak

Where do you go when you are an infrastructure software provider that already has 500,000 enterprise customers? That is about as good and as big as it gets, particularly when the biggest spenders in IT infrastructure, the hyperscalers and the largest cloud builders, create their own hardware and infrastructure software and inspire legions of companies to follow their lead, often with open source projects they found.

So VMware, which has grown into a nearly $7 billion software powerhouse, has done so in the only way that any company can that has reached such a saturation point in the market. Having …

Inside VMware Before It Dons The Dell Invisibility Cloak was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nutanix Pivots From Hyperconvergence To Platform

The chant for years and years from hyperconverged storage pioneer Nutanix has been “Ban the SAN.” But going forward, as the upstart is moving closer to its initial public offering, Nutanix wants to do much more. With two recent acquisitions, of PernixData and Calm.io, Nutanix is trying to transform itself into a proper, self-contained platform.

It will take either more acquisitions or lots more development to accomplish this goal. So Nutanix is by no means done. PernixData was equally ambitious in flash-accelerated and all-flash storage, and seems to have overextended itself as it invested in an effort to bring an …

Nutanix Pivots From Hyperconvergence To Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AMD Strikes A Balance – And Strikes Back – With Zen

Being too dependent on one source for a key component is not just a bad idea because of supply chain risks, but because it can result in higher prices.

Intel customers don’t need to be reminded of the lack of direct competitive pressure in the X86 chip market for servers, because they remember what competition that felt like. And customers and system makers that had taken a risk with AMD Opteron processors a decade ago don’t need to be reminded of either of these facts, particularly after AMD walked away from the server business in the wake of technical problems …

AMD Strikes A Balance – And Strikes Back – With Zen was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Big Blue Aims For The Sky With Power9

Intel has the kind of control in the datacenter that only one vendor in the history of data processing has ever enjoyed. That other company is, of course, IBM, and Big Blue wants to take back some of the real estate it lost in the datacenters of the world in the past twenty years.

The Power9 chip, unveiled at the Hot Chips conference this week, is the best chance the company has had to make some share gains against X86 processors since the Power4 chip came out a decade and a half ago and set IBM on the path to …

Big Blue Aims For The Sky With Power9 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

ARM Puts Some Muscle Into Vector Number Crunching

If the ARM processor in its many incarnations is to take on the reigning Xeon champ in the datacenter and the born again Power processor that is also trying to knock Xeons from the throne, it is going to need some bigger vector math capabilities. This is why, as we have previously reported, supercomputer maker Fujitsu has teamed up with ARM holdings to add better vector processing to the ARM architecture.

Details of that new vector format, known as Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), were revealed by ARM at the Hot Chips 28 conference in Silicon Valley, and any licensee …

ARM Puts Some Muscle Into Vector Number Crunching was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why Intel Is Tweaking Xeon Phi For Deep Learning

If there is anything that chip giant Intel has learned over the past two decades as it has gradually climbed to dominance in processing in the datacenter, it is ironically that one size most definitely does not fit all. Quite the opposite, and increasingly so.

As the tight co-design of hardware and software continues in all parts of the IT industry, we can expect fine-grained customization for very precise – and lucrative – workloads, like data analytics and machine learning, just to name two of the hottest areas today.

Software will run most efficiently on hardware that is tuned for …

Why Intel Is Tweaking Xeon Phi For Deep Learning was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Growing Hyperconverged Platforms Takes Patience, Time, And Money

In this day and age when the X86 server has pretty much taken over compute in the datacenter, enterprise customers still have their preferences and prejudices when it comes to the make and model of X86 machine that they deploy to run their applications. So a company that is trying to get its software into the datacenter, as server-storage hybrid Nutanix is, needs to befriend the big incumbent server makers and get its software onto their boxes.

This is not always an easy task, given that some of these companies have their own hyperconverged storage products or they have a …

Growing Hyperconverged Platforms Takes Patience, Time, And Money was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Leverages Chip Might To Etch Photonics Future

Computing has gone through a few waves. There was human to human computing in the first few decades, and in recent years it has been dominated by human to machine computing with hyperscale consumer-facing applications, and we are on the cusp of a third wave of machine to machine computing that will swell compute, storage, and networking to untold zettabytes of traffic.

Under such data strain, there is an explosive need for bandwidth across datacenters as a whole, but particularly among hyperscalers with their hundreds of millions to billions of users. (Ironically, some datacenters are only now moving to 10 …

Intel Leverages Chip Might To Etch Photonics Future was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Getting Cloud Out Of A Fugue State

The polyphonic weavings of a fugue in baroque music is a beautiful thing and an apt metaphor for how we want orchestration on cloud infrastructure to behave in a harmonic fashion. Unfortunately, most cloudy infrastructure is in more of a fugue state, complete with multiple personalities and amnesia.

A startup founded by some architects and engineers from Amazon Web Services wants to get the metaphor, and therefore the tools, right and have just popped out of stealth mode with a company aptly called Fugue to do just that.

Programmers are in charge of some of the largest and most profitable …

Getting Cloud Out Of A Fugue State was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Deep Learning Drives Nvidia’s Tesla Business To New Highs

It is a coincidence, but one laden with meaning, that Nvidia is setting new highs selling graphics processors at the same time that SGI, one of the early innovators in the fields of graphics and supercomputing, is being acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Nvidia worked up from GPUs for gaming PCs to supercomputers, and has spread its technology to deep learning, visualization, and virtual desktops, all with much higher margins than GPUs for PCs or any other client device could deliver. SGI, in its various incarnations, stayed at the upper echelons of computing where there is, to a certain …

Deep Learning Drives Nvidia’s Tesla Business To New Highs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.