Cloud Foundry Is Crossing The Chasm

IT managers at the world’s largest organizations have a lot of reasons to envy hyperscalers, including the fact that they seem to be flush with cash and it looks like they can buy or build just about anything their hearts desire.

While hyperscalers have to cope with scale issues, they do not have as much complexity, so they can pick a technology and run with it. Enterprises, on the other hand, are merging and acquiring all the time and have lots of silos of existing applications that cannot be thrown away.

The need to support existing as well as new …

Cloud Foundry Is Crossing The Chasm was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Long Future Ahead For Intel Xeon Processors

The personal computer has been the driver of innovation in the IT sector in a lot of ways for the past three and a half decades, but perhaps one of the most important aspects of the PC business is that it gave chip maker Intel a means of perfecting each successive manufacturing technology at high volume before moving it over to more complex server processors that would otherwise have lower yields and be more costly if they were the only chips Intel made with each process.

That PC volume is what gave Intel datacenter prowess, in essence, and it is …

The Long Future Ahead For Intel Xeon Processors was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mashing Up OpenStack With Hyperconverged Storage

While innovators in the HPC and hyperscale arenas usually have the talent and often have the desire to get into the code for the tools that they use to create their infrastructure, most enterprises want their software with a bit more fit and finish, and if they can get it so it is easy to operate and yet still in some ways open, they are willing to pay a decent amount of cash to get commercial-grade support.

OpenStack has pretty much vanquished Eucalyptus, CloudStack, and a few other open source alternatives from the corporate datacenter, and it is giving …

Mashing Up OpenStack With Hyperconverged Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

NVLink Takes GPU Acceleration To The Next Level

One of the breakthrough moments in computing, which was compelled by necessity, was the advent of symmetric multiprocessor, or SMP, clustering to make two or more processors look and act, as far as the operating system and applications were concerned, as a single, more capacious processor. With NVLink clustering for GPUs and for lashing GPUs to CPUs, Nvidia is bringing something as transformative as SMP was for CPUs to GPU accelerators.

The NVLink interconnect has been in development for years, and is one of the “five miracles” that Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang said at the GPU Technology Conference …

NVLink Takes GPU Acceleration To The Next Level was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Google Pits Dataflow Against Spark

It is almost without question that search engine giant Google has the most sophisticated and scalable data analytics platform on the planet. The company has been on the leading edge of analytics and the infrastructure that supports it for a decade and a half and through its various services it has an enormous amount of data on which to chew and draw inferences to drive its businesses.

In the wake of the launch of Amazon Web Services a decade ago, Google came to the conclusion that what end users really needed was services to store and process data, not access …

Google Pits Dataflow Against Spark was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How Big Is The Ecosystem Growing On Clouds?

Letting go of infrastructure is hard, but once you do – or perhaps more precisely, once you can – picking it back up again is a whole lot harder.

This is perhaps going to be the long-term lesson that cloud computing teaches the information technology industry as it moves back in time to data processing, as it used to be called, and back towards a rental model that got IBM sued by the US government in the nascent days of computing and compelled changes in Big Blue’s behavior that made it possible for others to create and sell systems against …

How Big Is The Ecosystem Growing On Clouds? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Uptake Of Broadwell Xeons Begins

Servers are still monolithic pieces of machinery and the kind of disaggregated and composable infrastructure that will eventually be the norm in the datacenter is still many years into the future. And that means organizations have to time their upgrade cycles for their clusters in a manner that is mindful of processor launches from their vendors.

With Intel dominating the server these days, its Xeon processor release dates are arguably the dominant component of the overall server cycle. But even taking this into account, there is a steady beat of demand for more computing in the datacenters of the world …

The Uptake Of Broadwell Xeons Begins was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Are ARM Server Chips Xeon Class, And Does It Matter?

We have often opined that ARMv8 processors would struggle to meet Intel Xeon chips head-on until they got a few microarchitecture revisions under their belts to improve per-core performance and until they narrowed the manufacturing gap to 14 nanometers or 16 nanometers, or perhaps even 10 nanometers.

But it looks like ARM server chip maker Applied Micro is aiming to do just that with its X-Gene 3 chip, which we profiled last November when its architecture was announced. Applied Micro has reached for this lofty goal before, with its X-Gene 1 and X-Gene 2 processors, but it appears that …

Are ARM Server Chips Xeon Class, And Does It Matter? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Does The Math On Broadwell Server Upgrades

The “Broadwell” generation of Xeon processors debuted a month ago, and now that the basic feeds and speeds are out there, customers are trying to figure out what to buy as they upgrade their systems and when to do it. This being a “tick” in the Intel chip cadence – meaning a shrink to smaller transistors instead of a “tock” rearchitecting of the Xeon core and the surrounding electronics – the Broadwell Xeons snap into existing “Haswell” systems and an upgrade is fairly straightforward for both system makers and their customers.

It all comes down to math about what to …

Intel Does The Math On Broadwell Server Upgrades was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Telcos Dial Up OpenStack And Mainstream It

OpenStack was born at the nexus of high performance computing at NASA and the cloud at Rackspace Hosting, but it might be the phone companies of the world that help it go mainstream.

It is safe to say that most of us probably think that our data plans and voice services for our mobile phones are way too expensive, and as it turns out, that is exactly how our mobile phone operators feel about the racks and rows and datacenters that they have full of essentially proprietary network equipment that comprises their wired and wireless networks. And so, all of …

Telcos Dial Up OpenStack And Mainstream It was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Once And Future IBM Platform

More than anything else, over its long history in the computing business, IBM has been a platform company and say what you will about the woes it has had through several phases of its history, what seems obvious is that when Big Blue forgets this it runs into trouble.

If you stare at its quarterly financial results long enough, you can still see that platform company looking back at you, even through the artificially dissected product groups the company has used for the past decade and the new ones that IBM is using starting in 2016.

It is important to …

The Once And Future IBM Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

OpenStack Still Has A Place In The Stack

The IT industry likes drama perhaps a bit more than is warranted by what actually goes on in the datacenters of the world. We are always spoiling for a good fight between rival technologies because the clash results in competition, which drives technologies forward and prices down.

Ultimately, organizations have to pick some kind of foundation for their modern infrastructure, and OpenStack, the cloud controller spawned from NASA and Rackspace Hosting nearly six years ago, is a growing and vibrant community that, despite the advent of Docker containers and the rise of Mesos and Kubernetes as an alternative substrate for …

OpenStack Still Has A Place In The Stack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

First Steps In The Program Model For Persistent Memory

In the previous article, we left off with the basic storage model having its objects first existing as changed in the processor’s cache, then being aged into volatile DRAM memory, often with changes first logged synchronously into I/O-based persistent storage, and later with the object’s changes proper later copied from volatile memory into persistent storage. That has been the model for what seems like forever.

With variations, that can be the storage model for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s The Machine as well. Since The Machine has a separate class of volatile DRAM memory along with rapidly-accessible, byte-addressable persistent memory accessible globally, the …

First Steps In The Program Model For Persistent Memory was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia’s Tesla P100 Steals Machine Learning From The CPU

Pattern analytics, deep learning, and machine learning have fueled a rapid rise in interest in GPU computing, in addition to GPU computing applications in high performance computing (HPC) and cloud-based data analytics.

As a high profile example, Facebook recently contributed its “Big Sur” design to the Open Compute Project (OCP), for use specifically in training neural networks and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) at scale. Facebook’s announcement of Big Sur says “Big Sur was built with the Nvidia Tesla M40 in mind but is qualified to support a wide range of PCI-e cards,” pointing out how pervasive Nvidia’s Tesla …

Nvidia’s Tesla P100 Steals Machine Learning From The CPU was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Owns The Server, Wants To Own The Rack

Chip maker Intel has been getting a lot of grief in recent days about missing the boat on putting chips in Apple’s iPhone back when the product was announced back in 2007, and then subsequently also losing out on the opportunity to have Intel Inside the Apple iPad tablet that came out three years later. Say what you will, but the folks that have been running Intel’s Data Center Group have not missed any boats, but rather have built a warship.

As the traditional PC client business continues to erode, the part of the company that is dedicated to the …

Intel Owns The Server, Wants To Own The Rack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Programming For Persistent Memory Takes Persistence

Some techies are capable of writing programs in assembler, but all will agree that they are very glad that they don’t need to. More know that they are fully capable of writing programs which manage their own heap memory, but are often enough pleased that the program model of some languages allow them to avoid it. Since like the beginning of time, computer scientists have been creating simplifying abstractions which allow programmers to avoid managing the hardware’s quirks, to write code more rapidly, and to even enhance its maintainability.

And so it is with a relatively new, and indeed both …

Programming For Persistent Memory Takes Persistence was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Drilling Down Into Nvidia’s “Pascal” GPU

Nvidia made a lot of big bets to bring its “Pascal” GP100 GPU to market and its first implementation of the GPU is aimed at its Tesla P100 accelerator for radically improving the performance of massively parallel workloads like scientific simulations and machine learning algorithms. The Pascal GPU is a beast, in all of the good senses of that word, and warrants a deep dive that was not possible on announcement day back at the GPU Technology Conference.

We did an overview of the chip back on announcement day, as well as talking about Nvidia’s own DGX-1 hybrid server …

Drilling Down Into Nvidia’s “Pascal” GPU was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Power9 Will Bring Competition To Datacenter Compute

The Power9 processor that IBM is working on in conjunction with hyperscale and HPC customers could be the most important chip that Big Blue has brought to market since the Power4 processor back in 2001. That was another world, back then, with the dot-com boom having gone bust and enterprises looking for a less expensive but beefy NUMA server on which to run big databases and transaction processing systems.

The world that the Power9 processor will enter in 2017 is radically changed. A two-socket system has more compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth than those behemoths from a decade …

Power9 Will Bring Competition To Datacenter Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Oracle Steps With Moore’s Law To Rev Exadata Database Machines

Absorbing a collection of new processing, memory, storage, and networking technologies in a fast fashion on a complex system is no easy task for any system maker or end user creating their own infrastructure, and it takes time even for a big company like Oracle to get all the pieces together and weld them together seamlessly. But the time it takes is getting smaller, and Oracle has absorbed a slew of new tech in its latest Exadata X6-2 platforms.

The updated machines are available only weeks after Intel launched its new “Broadwell” Xeon E5 v4 processors, which have been shipping …

Oracle Steps With Moore’s Law To Rev Exadata Database Machines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hyperscalers And Clouds On The Xeon Bleeding Edge

Hyperscalers and cloud builders are different in a lot of ways from the typical enterprise IT shop. Perhaps the most profound one that has emerged in recent years is something that used to be only possible in the realm of the most exotic supercomputing centers, and that is this: They get what they want, and they get it ahead of everyone else.

Back in the day, before the rise of mass customization of the Xeon product line by chip maker Intel, it was HPC customers who were often trotted out as early adopters of a new processor technology and usually …

Hyperscalers And Clouds On The Xeon Bleeding Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.