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.

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.