The HPC field hasn’t always had the closest of relationships with the cloud.
Concerns about the performance of the workloads on a hypervisor running in the cloud, the speed of the networking and capacity of storage, the security and privacy of the research data and results, and the investments of millions of dollars already made to build massive on-premises supercomputers and other systems can become issues when considering moving applications to the cloud.
However, HPC workloads also are getting more complex and compute-intensive, and demand from researchers for more compute time and power on those on-premises supercomputers is growing. Cloud …
An Adaptive Approach to Bursting HPC to the Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
If there is one thing that can be said about modern distributed computing that has held true for three decades now, it is that the closer you get to the core of the datacenter, the beefier the compute tends to be. Conversely, as computing gets pushed to the edge, it gets lighter by the necessity of using little power and delivering just enough performance to accomplish whatever data crunching is necessary outside of the datacenter.
While we have focused on the compute in the traditional datacenter since founding The Next Platform three years ago, occasionally dabbling in the microserver arena …
AMD Gets Zen About The Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The demands for more compute resources, power and density in HPC environments is fueling the need for innovative ways to cool datacenters that are churning through petabyte levels of data to run modern simulation workloads that touch on everything from healthcare and climate change to space exploration and oil and gas initiatives.
The top cooling technologies for most datacenters are air and chilled water. However, Lenovo is promoting its latest warm-water cooling system for HPC clusters with its ThinkSystem SD650 systems that the company says will lower datacenter power consumption by 30 to 40 percent of the more traditional cooling …
Lenovo Sees Expanding Market for Dense Water-Cooled HPC was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Former Harvard Computer Science Lead Brings Distributed Systems Experience to Top Publication’s Readers
The Next Platform is proud to announce that former Assistant Dean and Distinguished Engineer for Research Computing at Harvard, Dr. James Cuff, has joined the editorial team in a full-time capacity as Distinguished Technical Author.
As the leading publication covering distributed systems in research and large enterprise, Dr. Cuff rounds out a seasoned editorial team that delivers in-depth analysis from the worlds of supercomputing, artificial intelligence, cloud and hyperscale datacenters, and the many other technology areas that comprise the highest end of today’s IT ecosystems.
Dr. Cuff …
The Next Platform Announces Renowned HPC Expert Joins Team was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The best way to make a wave is to make a big splash, which is something that Andy Bechtolsheim, perhaps the most famous serial entrepreneur in IT infrastructure, is very good at doing. As one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and a slew of networking and system startups as well as the first investor in Google, he doesn’t just see waves, but generates them and then surfs on them, creating companies and markets as he goes along.
Bechtolsheim was a PhD student at Stanford University, working on a project that aimed to integrate networking interfaces with processors when he …
The Road To 400G Ethernet Is Paved With Bechtolsheim’s Intentions was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Much of the focus of the recent high-profile budget battle in Washington – and for that matter, many of the financial debates over the past few decades – has been around how much money should go to the military and how much to domestic programs like Social Security and Medicare.
In the bipartisan deal struck earlier this month, both sides saw funding increase over the next two years, with the military seeing its budget jump $160 billion. Congressional Republicans boasted of a critical win for the Department of Defense (DoD) that will result in more soldiers, better weapons, and improved …
HPE Brings More HPC To The DoD was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
IBM’s systems hardware business finished 2017 in a stronger position than it has seen in years, due in large part to the continued growth of the company’s stalwart System z mainframes and Power platform. As we at The Next Platform noted, the last three months of last year were also the first full quarter of shipments of IBM’s new System z14 mainframes, while the first nodes of the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the “Sierra” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began to ship.
Not to be overlooked was the strong performance of the IBM’s storage …
IBM Storage Rides Up Flash And NVM-Express was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
On today’s episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform, we talk about quantum computing performance and functionality with Rigetti Computing quantum hardware engineer, Matt Raegor.
We talked with Rigetti not long ago about the challenges of having an end-to-end quantum computing startup (developing the full stack—from hardware to software to the fabs that make the quantum processing units). This conversation takes that one step further by looking at how performance can be considered via an analogy of wine glasses and their various resonances. Before we get to that, however, we talk more generally about Reagor’s early work …
Quantum Computing Performance By the Glass was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Computing, which always includes storage and networking, evolves. Just like everything else on Earth. Anything with a benefit in efficiency will always find its niche, and it will change to plug into new niches as they arise and make use of ever-cheaper technologies as they advance from the edges.
It is with this in mind that we ponder the datacenter. As in the center of data, which has been expanding and thinning for a very long time now, and which is pushing itself – and us – to the edge. What, we wonder, is a datacenter that doesn’t have …
Pushed To The Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
On today’s podcast episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform, we talk with computer architecture researcher Roman Kaplan about the role memristors might play in accelerating common machine learning algorithms including K-means. Kaplan and team have been looking at performance and efficiency gains by letting ReRAM pick up some of the data movement tab on traditional architectures.
Kaplan, a researcher at the Viterbi faculty of Electrical Engineering in Israel, along with his team, have produced some interesting benchmarks comparing K-means and K-nearest neighbor computations on CPU, GPU, FPGA, and most notably, the Automata Processor from Micron to their …
Machine Learning with a Memristor Boost was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
High performance computing (HPC) enables organizations to work more quickly and effectively than traditional compute platforms—but that might not be enough to succeed in today’s evolving digital marketplace.
Mainstream HPC usage is transforming the modern workplace as organizations utilize individually deployed HPC clusters and composable infrastructures to increase IT speed and performance and help employees achieve higher levels of productivity. However, maintaining disparate and isolated systems can pose a significant challenge—such as preventing workloads from reaching optimal efficiency. By converging the muscle of HPC and virtualized environments, organizations can deliver a superior virtual graphics experience to any device in order …
Add Firepower to Your Data with HPC-Virtual GPU Convergence was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The supercomputing business, the upper stratosphere of the much broader high performance computing segment of the IT industry, is without question one of the most exciting areas in data processing and visualization.
It is also one of the most frustrating sectors in which to try to make a profitable living. The customers are the most demanding, the applications are the most complex, the budget pressures are intense, the technical challenges are daunting, the governments behind major efforts can be capricious, and the competition is fierce.
This is the world where Cray, which literally invented the supercomputing field, and its competitors …
Supercomputing At The Crossroads was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Two important changes to the datacenter are happening in the same year—one on the hardware side, another on the software side. And together, they create a force big enough to blow away the clouds, at least over the long haul.
As we covered this year from a datacentric (and even supercomputing) point of view, 2018 is the time for Arm to shine. With a bevy of inroads to commercial markets at the high-end all the way down to the micro-device level, the architecture presents a genuine challenge to the processor establishment. And now, coupled with the biggest trend since …
Inference is the Hammer That Breaks the Datacenter was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
For several years, work has been underway to develop a standard interconnect that can address the increasing speeds in servers driven by the growing use of such accelerators as GPUs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and the pressures put on memory by the massive amounts of data being generated and bottleneck between the CPUs and the memory.
Any time the IT industry wants a standard, you can always expect at least two, and this time around is no different. Today there is a cornucopia of emerging interconnects, some of them overlapping in purpose, some working side by side, to break …
Gen-Z Interconnect Ready To Restore Compute Memory Balance was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It has taken nearly four years for the low end, workhorse machines in IBM’s Power Systems line to be updated, and the long awaited Power9 processors and the shiny new “ZZ” systems have been unveiled. We have learned quite a bit about these machines, many of which are not really intended for the kinds of IT organizations that The Next Platform is focused on. But several of the machines are aimed at large enterprises, service providers, and even cloud builders who want something with a little more oomph on a lot of fronts than an X86 server can deliver in …
The Ins And Outs Of IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
When it comes to machine learning training, people tend to focus on the compute. We always want to know if the training is being done on specialized parallel X86 devices, like Intel’s Xeon Phi, or on massively parallel GPU devices, like Nvidia’s “Pascal” and “Volta” accelerators, or even on custom devices from the likes of Nervana Systems (now part of Intel), Wave Systems, Graphcore, Google, or Fujitsu.
But as is the case with other kinds of high performance computing, the network matters when it comes to machine learning, and it can be the differentiating …
Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
On today’s podcast episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform, we talk about exascale power and resiliency by way of a historical overview of architectures with long-time HPC researcher, Dr. Robert Fowler.
Fowler’s career in HPC began at his alma mater, Harvard in the early seventies with scientific codes and expanded across the decades to include roles at several universities, including the University of Washington, the University of Rochester, Rice University, and most recently, RENCI at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he spearheads high performance computing initiatives and projects, including one we will …
Looking Back: The Evolution of HPC Power, Efficiency and Reliability was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The field of competitors looking to bring exascale-capable computers to the market is a somewhat crowded one, but the United States and China continue to be the ones that most eyes are on.
It’s a clash of an established global superpower and another one on the rise, and one that that envelopes a struggle for economic, commercial and military advantages and a healthy dose of national pride. And because of these two countries, the future of exascale computing – which to a large extent to this point has been more about discussion, theory and promise – will come into sharper …
A Look at What’s in Store for China’s Tianhe-2A Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Today’s podcast episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform will focus on an effort to standardize key neural network features to make development and innovation easier and more productive.
While it is still too early to standardize across major frameworks for training, for instance, portability for new architectures via a common file format is a critical first step toward more interoperability between frameworks and between training and inferencing tools.
To explore this, we are joined by Neil Trevett, Vice President of the Developer Ecosystem at Nvidia and President of the Khronos Group, an industry consortium focused on creating open …
Establishing Early Neural Network Standards was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The HPC crowd got a little taste of the IBM’s “Nimbus” Power9 processors for scale out systems, juiced by Nvidia “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators, last December with the Power AC922 system that is the basis of the “Summit” and “Sierra” pre-exascale supercomputers being built by Big Blue for the US Department of Energy.
Now, IBM’s enterprise customers that use more standard iron in their clusters, and who predominantly have CPU-only setups rather than adding in GPUs or FPGAs and who need a lot more local storage, are getting more of a Power9 meal with the launch of six new machines …
A First Look At IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.