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.

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.