Leaving Fixed Function Switches Behind For Universal Leafs

There are two competing trends in platform designs that architects always have to contend with. They can build a platform that performs a specific function and does it well, or create a more generic platform that sacrifices some efficiency but does a lot of jobs well. Sometimes you try to shoot the gap between these two poles.

That is precisely what Arista Networks, the networking upstart that has serial entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim as its chief development officer, is doing with a new line of what it is calling “universal leaf” switches. The leaf switches (does one say “leafs” or “leaves” …

Leaving Fixed Function Switches Behind For Universal Leafs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Putting More Brains In The Network Frees Up Compute

One of the things that high-end network adapter and switch maker Mellanox Technologies got through its $811 million acquisition of network processing chip maker EZchip last September was a team that was well versed in massively parallel processor chip design, and one that could make Mellanox a potential player in the server chip space.

But not necessarily in the way you might be thinking about it.

The reason this is the case is that in July 2014, EZchip, wanting to expand out beyond its networking chip business as Applied Micro, Cavium, and Broadcom have all done with ARM-based server chips, …

Putting More Brains In The Network Frees Up Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

South African Lengau System Leaps Towards Petaflops

There are plenty of people in industry, academia, and government that believe there is a direct correlation between the investment in supercomputing technologies and the healthy and vibrancy of the regional or national economy. So getting a big bump up in performance, as South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing has just done this week, is a big deal.

Up until now, CHPC has had fairly modest sized systems, but thanks to Moore’s Law advancements that have radically brought down the cost of compute and a more aggressive plan to invest in HPC within South Africa, CHPC is breaking into …

South African Lengau System Leaps Towards Petaflops was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hyperscalers, Enterprises Pull Back On Server Spending

The server cycle has some long waves that are not always in phase with each other, and that is generally a good thing. But every now and then, the waves synchronize, and it is either really exciting as the market rises or something of a bummer as it falls. In the first quarter of this year, there was a bit of a dip but still an order of magnitude less dramatic than the collapse in shipments and sales during the Great Recession.

It is important to keep perspective, and it is actually quite remarkable that the server market is as …

Hyperscalers, Enterprises Pull Back On Server Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Big Iron Xeons Get A Broadwell Compute And Memory Boost

Intel is coming to the finish line with its 14 nanometer chip making process with the launch of the “Broadwell” generation of Xeon E7 server processors in China today.

Why China? Because for reasons that are not immediately obvious but are completely beneficial to Intel, the Chinese market has for the past several years been adopting four-socket servers in large scale datacenters at a rate that is considerably higher than their peers in the rest of the world. These new Xeon E7 v4 processors will be a big hit for big iron there and anywhere else where having a big …

Big Iron Xeons Get A Broadwell Compute And Memory Boost was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Next-Generation ThunderX2 ARM Targets Skylake Xeons

Networking chip maker Cavium is one of the ARM server chip upstarts that is taking on Intel’s hegemony in the datacenter, and is probably getting the most traction among its ARM peers in the past year with its ThunderX multicore processors.

The first-generation ThunderX chips are seeing the most interest from hyperscalers and HPC centers, plus a few cloud builders, telcos, and large enterprises, that want to explore the possibilities of a different server architecture, and they will be even more intrigued by the second-generation ThunderX2 processors, which Cavium unveiled earlier this week at the Computex trade show in Taipei, …

Next-Generation ThunderX2 ARM Targets Skylake Xeons was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

eBay Taps Dell Triton Systems To Overclock Search Engines

While online auctioneer eBay does not run the largest search engine in the world, search is a very key component of its service, which has over 162 million active buyers and 900 million product listings. Looking to improve upon its current hardware infrastructure underpinning its search engine, eBay has tapped Dell to create a new water-cooled, hyperscale-style rack system that will let it overclock its servers and boost their performance on compute-intensive search algorithms.

The hyperscalers are all a bit cagey about the search engine infrastructure that they use because it is such a critical component of what they do, …

eBay Taps Dell Triton Systems To Overclock Search Engines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons

The datacenter is a battleground with many fronts these days, with intense competition between compute, memory, storage, and networking components. In terms of revenues, profits, and prestige, the compute territory is the most valuable that chip makers and their system partners are fighting for, and the ARM and OpenPower collectives are doing their best to take some ground from a very powerful Intel.

As such, chip makers end up comparing themselves to Intel Xeon or Atom processors, and Intel sometimes makes comparisons back. At the high end, Intel is battling the Power8 processor championed by IBM and to a lesser …

Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Hunkers Down On Datacenter Hardware

Any aspirations that the Hewlett-Packard that we knew for nearly a decade and a half to build a conglomerate that resembled IBM in its own former enterprise breadth and depth of software, services, and systems is now over with the company spinning out its Enterprise Services business and focusing very tightly on its core hardware and related software businesses.

In conjunction with the posting of its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 206, the trimmed down Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which has not included the PC and printer businesses since last year, announced that it was going to …

HPE Hunkers Down On Datacenter Hardware was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Driving Compute And Storage Scale Independently

While legacy monolithic applications will linger in virtual machines for an incredibly long time in the datacenter, new scale-out applications run best on new architectures. And that means the underlying hardware will look a lot more like what the hyperscalers have built than traditional siloed enterprise systems.

But most enterprises can’t design their own systems and interconnects, as Google, Facebook, and others have done, and as such, they will rely on others to forge their machines. A group of hot-shot system engineers that were instrumental in creating systems at Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems in the past two decades have …

Driving Compute And Storage Scale Independently was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Samsung Experts Put Kubernetes Through The Paces

No one expects that setting up management tools for complex distributed computing frameworks to be an easy thing, but there is always room for improvement–and always a chance to take out unnecessary steps and improve the automated deployment of such tools.

The hassle of setting up such frameworks, such as Hadoop for data analytics, OpenStack for virtualized infrastructure, or Kubernetes or Mesos for software container management is an inhibitor to the adoption of those new technologies. Working with raw open source software and weaving it together into a successful management control plane is not something all enterprises have the skills …

Samsung Experts Put Kubernetes Through The Paces was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Chip Upstarts Get Coherent With Hybrid Compute

Accelerators and coprocessors are proliferating in the datacenter, and it has been a boon for speeding up certain kinds of workloads and, in many cases, making machine learning or simulation jobs possible at scale for the first time. But ultimately, in a hybrid system, the processors and the accelerators have to share data, and moving it about is a pain in the neck.

Having the memory across these devices operate in a coherent manner – meaning that all devices can address all memory attached to those devices in a single, consistent way – is one of the holy grails of …

Chip Upstarts Get Coherent With Hybrid Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

In-Memory Breathes New Life Into NUMA

Hyperscalers and the academics that often do work with them have invented a slew of distributed computing methods and frameworks to get around the problem of scaling up shared memory systems based on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) or non-uniform memory access (NUMA) techniques that have been in the systems market for decades. SMP and NUMA systems are expensive and they do not scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes, much less the tens of thousands of nodes that hyperscalers require to support their data processing needs.

It sure would be convenient if they did. But for those who are not hyperscalers, …

In-Memory Breathes New Life Into NUMA was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Throws Weight Behind Phase Change Memory

There is no question that the memory hierarchy in systems is being busted wide open and that new persistent memory technology that can be byte addressable like DRAM or block addressable like storage are going to radically change the architecture of machines and the software that runs on them. Picking what memory might go mainstream is another story.

It has been decades since IBM made its own DRAM, but the company still has a keen interest in doing research and development on core processing and storage technologies and in integrating new devices with its Power-based systems.

To that end, IBM …

IBM Throws Weight Behind Phase Change Memory was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Scaling All Flash Arrays Up And Out

The ubiquity of the Xeon server has been a boon for datacenters and makers of IT products alike, creating an ever more powerful on which to build compute, storage, and now networking or a mix of the three all in the same box. But that universal hardware substrate cuts both ways, and IT vendors have to be clever indeed if they hope to differentiate from their competitors.

So it is with the “Wolfcreek” storage platform from DataDirect Networks, which specializes in high-end storage arrays aimed at HPC, webscale, and high-end enterprise workloads. DDN started unveiling the Wolfcreek system last June …

Scaling All Flash Arrays Up And Out was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Tesla Pushes Nvidia Deeper Into The Datacenter

If you are trying to figure out what impact the new “Pascal” family of GPUs is going to have on the business at Nvidia, just take a gander at the recent financial results for the datacenter division of the company. If Nvidia had not spent the better part of a decade building its Tesla compute business, it would be a little smaller and quite a bit less profitable.

In the company’s first quarter of fiscal 2017, which ended on May 1, Nvidia posted sales of $1.31 billion, up 13 percent from the year ago period, and net income hit $196 …

Tesla Pushes Nvidia Deeper Into The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Shared Memory Pushes Wheat Genomics To Boost Crop Yields

Wheat has been an important part of the human diet for the past 9,000 years or so, and depending on the geography can comprise up to 40 percent to 50 percent of the diet within certain regions today.

But there is a problem. Pathogens and changing climate are adversely affecting wheat yields just as Earth’s population is growing, and the Genome Analysis Center (TGAC) is front and center in sequencing and assembling the wheat genome, a multi-year effort that is going to be substantially accelerated by some hardware and updated software.

With the world’s population expected to hit 10 billion …

Shared Memory Pushes Wheat Genomics To Boost Crop Yields was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Facebook Flow Is An AI Factory Of The Future

We have been convinced for many years that machine learning, the kind of artificial intelligence that actually works in practice, not in theory, would be a key element of the next platform. In fact, it might be the most important part of the stack. And therefore, those who control how we deploy machine learning will, to a large extent, control the nature of future applications and the systems that run them.

Machine learning is the killer app for the hyperscalers, just like modeling and simulation were for supercomputing centers decades ago, and we believe we are only seeing the tip …

Facebook Flow Is An AI Factory Of The Future was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Google And Friends Add Prometheus To Kubernetes Platform

There are a lot of moving parts in a modern platform, and in this regard, they are no different from the platforms made a generation earlier. But a modern platform has a lot more automation and is handling more dynamic workloads that are popping into and out of existence on different parts of a cluster like quantum particles, and it takes a higher level of sophistication to monitor and manage the stack and the apps running on it.

Frustration with existing open source monitoring tools like Nagios and Ganglia is why the hyperscaler giants created their own tools – Google …

Google And Friends Add Prometheus To Kubernetes Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

EMC Shoots For Explosive Performance With Isilon Nitro

Storage giant EMC, soon to be part of the Dell Technologies conglomerate, declared that this would be the year of all flash for the company when it launched its DSSD D5 arrays back in February. It was not kidding, and as a surprise at this weeks EMC World 2016 conference, the company gave a sneak peek at a future all-flash version of its Isilon storage arrays, which are also aimed at high performance jobs but which are designed to scale capacity well beyond that of the DSSD.

The DSSD D5 is an impressive beast, packing 100 TB of usable …

EMC Shoots For Explosive Performance With Isilon Nitro was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.