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.
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.
Building high performance systems at the bleeding edge hardware-wise without considering the way data actually moves through such a system is too common—and woefully so, given the fact that understanding and articulating an application’s requirements can lead to dramatic I/O improvements.
A range of “Frequently Unanswered Questions” are at the root of inefficient storage design due to a lack of specified workflows, and this problem is widespread, especially in verticals where data isn’t the sole business driver.
One could make the argument that data is at the heart of any large-scale computing endeavor, but as workflows change, the habit of …
Framing Questions for Optimized I/O Subsystems was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
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 powerful Cori supercomputer, now being readied for deployment at NERSC (The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center), has been named in honor of Gerty Cori. Cori was a Czech-American biochemist (August 15, 1896 – October 26, 1957) who became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
Cori (a.k.a. NERSC-8) is the Center’s newest supercomputer. Phase 1 of the system is currently installed with Phase 2 slated to be up and running this year. Phase 1 is a Cray XC40 supercomputer based on the Intel Haswell multi-core processor with a theoretical peak performance of 1.92 petaflops/sec. It …
NERSC Preps for Next Generation “Cori” Supercomputer was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
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.
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.
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.
When considering system and software needs at massive scale, one application area that tends to shed light on what lies ahead is weather prediction and modeling.
Over the last year, we have had a number of pieces about what centers that deliver forecasts (and carry out research to improve those predictions) need to do to stay ahead, and while conversations about hardware and software are important, what is emerging is that weather, like many other areas of computing at scale, actually needs a platform versus innovation at one or two levels of the stack.
With that idea of a platform …
The Weather Company Seeks Next Data-Driven Platform was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
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.
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.
The datacenter is going through tremendous change, and many long-held assumptions are now being called into question. Even the basic process of separating data onto a separate storage area network, growing it, and pulling it across the network and processing it, is no longer necessarily the best way to handle data. The separation between production and analytics, which has evolved into an art form, is also breaking down because it takes a day or longer to get operational data into analytic systems.
As a backdrop to all of these technology changes, organizations say they need more agility. The ability to …
What’s Fueling the Move to a Converged Data Platform? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Chip startups come and go. Generally, we cover them because of novel architectures or potential for specific applications. But in some cases, like today, it is for those reasons and because of the people behind an effort to bring a new architecture into a crowded, and ultimately limited, landscape.
With $100 million in “patience money” from a few individual investors who believe in the future of sparse matrix-based computing on low-power and reprogrammable devices, Austin-based Knupath, has spent a decade in stealth mode designing and fabricating a custom digital signal processor (DSP) chip to target deep learning training, machine …
Former NASA Exec Brings Stealth Machine Learning Chip to Light was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
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.
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.
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.
During a trip to Dell in Austin, Texas this week, little did The Next Platform know that the hardware giant and nearby Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) had major news to share on the supercomputing front.
It appears the top ten-ranked Stampede supercomputer is set for an extensive, rolling upgrade—one that will keep TACC’s spot in the top tier of supercomputing sites and which will feature the latest Knights Landing processors and over time, a homogeneous Omni-Path fabric. The net effect of the upgrade will be a whopping 18 petaflops of peak performance by 2018.
The new system will begin …
Knights Landing Upgrade Will Push TACC Supercomputer to 18PF was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
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.
Back in 2009, when yours truly was assigned the primary beat of covering supercomputing on remote hardware (then dubbed the mysterious “cloud”), the possibility that cloud-based high performance computing was little more than a pipe dream.
At that time, most scientific and technical computing communities had already developed extensive grids to extend their research beyond physical borders, and the idea of introducing new levels of latency, software, and management interfaces did not appear to be anything most HPC centers were looking forward to—even with the promise of cost-savings (as easy “bursting” was still some time off).
Just as Amazon Web …
AWS Brings Supercomputing Set Further into Fold was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Computing for neuroscience, which has aided in our understanding of the structure and function of the brain, has been around for decades already. More recently, however, there has been neuroscience for computing, or the use of computational principles of the brain for generic data processing. For each of these neuroscience-driven areas there is a key limitation—scalability.
This is not just scalability in terms of software or hardware systems, but on the application side, limits in terms of efficiently deploying computational tools at sufficient size and time scales to yield far greater insight. While adding more compute to the problem …
Strong Scaling Key to Redrawing Neuroscience Borders was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.