Stacking Up Oracle S7 Against Intel Xeon

Even though the Xeon processor has become the default engine for most kinds of compute in the datacenter, it is by no means to only option that is available to large enterprises that can afford to indulge in different kinds of systems because they do not have to homogenize their systems as hyperscalers must if they are to keep their IT costs in check.

Sometimes, there are benefits to being smaller, and the ability to pick point solutions that are good for a specific job is one of them. This has been the hallmark of the high-end of computing since …

Stacking Up Oracle S7 Against Intel Xeon was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Systems Are The Table Stakes For IBM’s Evolution

Big Blue does not participate in any meaningful sense in the booming market for infrastructure for the massive hyperscale and public cloud buildout that is transforming the face of the IT business. But the company is still a bellwether for computing at large enterprises, and its efforts to – once again – transform itself to address the very different needs that companies have compared to a decade or two ago are fascinating to contemplate.

In a very real way, the manner that IBM talks about its own business these days, which is very different from how it described the rising …

Systems Are The Table Stakes For IBM’s Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC Flows Into Hyperscale With Dell Triton

Dell recently unveiled its datacenter liquid cooling technology under the codename of Triton. Dell’s Extreme Scale Infrastructure team originally designed and developed Triton as a proof of concept for eBay, leveraging Dell’s existing rack-scale infrastructure.

In addition to liquid-cooled cold plates that directly contact the CPUs, Triton is also designed with embedded liquid to air heat exchangers to cool the airborne heat of a large number of tightly packed and hot processor nodes using 80% of the cooling capacity of the heat exchangers. That leaves 20% of Triton’s cooling capacity as “overhead”. The overhead cooling capacity is then used to …

HPC Flows Into Hyperscale With Dell Triton was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Weaving Accelerators Into The Memory Complex

In the first part of this series on the proposed Cache Coherence Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) standard, we talked about the issues of cache coherence and the need to share memory across various kinds of compute elements in a system. In this second part, we will go deeper into the approach of providing memory coherence across CPUs and various kinds of accelerators that have their own local memory.

A local accelerator could potentially be anything. You want something to execute faster than what is possible in today’s generic processors, and so you throw specialized hardware at the problem. Still, …

Weaving Accelerators Into The Memory Complex was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Ranking High Performance Interconnects

With the increasing adoption of scale-out architectures and cloud computing, high performance interconnect (HPI) technologies have become a more critical part of IT systems. Today, HPI represents its own market segment at the upper echelons of the networking equipment market, supporting applications requiring extremely low latency and exceptionally high bandwidth.

As big data analytics, machine learning, and business optimization applications become more prevalent, HPI technologies are of increasing importance for enterprises as well. These most demanding enterprise applications, as well as high performance computing (HPC) applications, are generally addressed with scale-out clusters based on large numbers of ‘skinny’ nodes. The …

Ranking High Performance Interconnects was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Drilling Into The CCIX Coherence Standard

The past decade or so has seen some really phenomenal capacity growth and similarly remarkable software technology in support of distributed-memory systems.  When work can be spread out across a lot of processors and/or a lot of disjointed memory, life has been good.

Pity, though, that poor application needing access to a lot of shared memory or which could use the specialized and so faster resources of local accelerators. For such, distributed memory just does not cut it and having to send work out to an IO-attached accelerator chews into much of what would otherwise be an accelerator’s advantages. With …

Drilling Into The CCIX Coherence Standard was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Knights Landing Will Waterfall Down From On High

With the general availability of the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us.

We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than …

Knights Landing Will Waterfall Down From On High was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

China’s Triple Play For Pre-Exascale Systems

Before any country can deploy an exascale system, they have to get pre-exascale prototypes into the field to test out their underlying technologies and determine what approaches have the best chance of scaling up performance and being manufactured affordably. It looks like China is looking at three different pre-exascale systems, and none of them will deploy processors or accelerators made by US companies.

It is no secret that China has wanted to develop an indigenous capability to design chips and build supercomputer-class systems, and this was true even before the US government put the kibosh on selling Intel Xeon and …

China’s Triple Play For Pre-Exascale Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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.