Three months ago, The Next Platform promised a three part conversation about practical computational balance with the final part focusing on software. …
Practical Computational Balance: The Challenges Of Software was written by James Cuff at .
One cloud was never going to be enough, no matter how much Amazon Web Services wants it to be otherwise. …
A Private Rackspace Still Embodies The Public Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
Believe it or not, Cisco Systems has a bunch of customers for its UCS blade and rack servers that are in the gaming industry, which has its share of near-hyperscale players who have widely geographically distributed clusters spread around the globe so players can get very low latency access over the Internet to games running on that infrastructure. …
Cisco Gets Modular With Servers In Epyc Fashion was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
On the face of it, if you just look at the top level numbers, the server market is booming like we have not seen since the recovery in the wake of the Great Recession for a few quarters here and there between late 2009 and early 2011. …
The Server Boom Town Is Built On High Component Prices was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Nvidia got a little taste of hardware, and the company’s top brass have decided that they like having a lot of iron in their financial diet. …
Nvidia Takes More Control Of Its GPU Compute Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
We recently considered how computing was often being called distributed even when it shouldn’t be, or being called something else when it really isn’t. …
All Things Decentralized was written by James Cuff at .
Hewlett Packard built up its conglomerate in the 2000s in good faith, trying to be a larger and more profitable supplier of IT products and services. …
We Fight, Get Beat, Rise, And Fight Again was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Last week at the Fujitsu Forum in Tokyo, Lisa Spelman, who is general manager of Xeon products and Data Center Marketing at Intel, did a soft announcement of the hybrid Xeon CPU-Arria 10 FPGA hybrid chip that the company has been talking about for years and that is now available to selected customers. …
A Peek Inside That Intel Xeon-FPGA Hybrid Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson said that a week is a long time in politics. …
Making Sense Of Sensu was written by James Cuff at .
In the United Kingdom, there is a topical BBC Radio 4 comedy panel show called I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. …
Intel AI VP Gadi Singer On One Song To The Tune Of Another was written by James Cuff at .
Any new and powerful technology always cuts both ways.
The rapid rise of the machine learning flavor of artificial intelligence is due to the fact that, unlike prior approaches, it actually works and therefore can be embraced by a wide swath of businesses, research and educational institutions, and technology companies. …
Making AI Users Accountable For Their Algorithms was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
It has been a long time since the Japan Meteorological Agency has deployed the kind of supercomputing oomph for weather forecasting that the island nation would seem to need to improve its forecasts. But JMA, like its peers in the United States, Europe, and India, is investing heavily in new supercomputers to get caught up, and specifically, has just done a deal with Cray to get a pair of XC50 systems that will have 18.2 petaflops of aggregate performance.
This is a lot more compute capacity than JMA has had available to do generic weather forecasting as well as do …
Weather Forecasting Gets A Big Lift In Japan was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
“Death and taxes” is a phrase that is usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin from a quote in a 1789 letter: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Public cloud computing providers didn’t exist back in the days of Franklin, but if they did, they would have no doubt made the list. Here’s why. Public clouds for large data analysis, just like death and taxes, are clearly inevitable because of two things. One simple and now rather worn out cliché. That would be scale and the slightly more subtle data.
Nation states are racing …
The Inevitability Of Death, Taxes, And Clouds was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.
Success can be its own kind of punishment in this world.
Since the dawn of modern computing 130 years ago with tabulating machines derived from looms, there have always been issues of scale when it comes to compute and storage. While all modern businesses worry about the IT infrastructure and how dependent they are on it, there are special classes of systems that are at organizations that have intense computing and storage demands, and usually also severe networking requirements, and they of necessity push the boundaries of what can be done simply because things need to be done.
They have …
It’s Called Distributed Computing, Even When It Shouldn’t Be was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Way back in the early days of the commercial Internet, when we all logged into what seemed to be new but what was actually a quite old service used by academic institutions and government agencies that rode on the backbones of the telecommunications network, there were many, many thousands of Internet service providers who provided the interface between our computers and the network capacity that was the onramp of the information superhighway.
Most of these ISPs are gone today, and have been replaced by a few major telco, cable, and wireless network operators who provide us with our Internet service. …
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall In Public Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
For years, enterprises have wanted to pool and then carve up the myriad resources of the datacenter to enable them to more efficiently run their workloads, reduce power consumption, and improve utilization rates. It takes what seems like an endless series of technologies advances to move towards this goal. But, ever so slowly, we are getting there.
Virtualization that started in the servers flowed into the storage realm and eventually into the network, and converged systems mashing up virtual compute and virtual networking soon begat hyperconverged infrastructure, which added in virtual storage – one of the fastest growing segments …
Forging Composable Infrastructure For Memory-Centric Systems was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Any processor that hopes to displace the Xeon as the engine of choice for general purpose compute has to do one of two things, and we would argue both: It has to be a relatively seamless replacement for a Xeon processor inside of existing systems, much as the Opteron was back in the early 2000s, and it has to offer compelling advantages that yield better performance per dollar per watt per unit of space in a rack.
The “Vulcan” ThunderX2 chips, at least based on the initial information that is available in the wake of their launch, appear to do …
Getting Logical About Cavium ThunderX2 Versus Intel Skylake was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Building custom processors and systems to annotate chunks of DNA is not a new phenomenon but given the increasing complexity of genomics as well as explosion in demand, this trend is being revived.
Those that have been around in this area in the last couple of decades will recall that back in 2000, the then Celera Genomics acquired Paracel Genomics (an accelerator and software company) for $250 million who at the time had annual sales of $14.2 million. Paracel had a system they called GeneMatcher, who were able to fit 7,000 processors into a box that could compete with over …
A Revival in Custom Hardware For Accelerated Genomics was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.
It is safe to say that companies that have traditionally built server, storage, and switch hardware have had a tough time finding their place in a world that is increasingly allergic to appliances and wants everything to come as software that customers have more control over. Even those vendors that are innovating at the hardware level have a heavy software hook, and no hardware vendor can leave itself in the position of just shifting boxes if it hopes to have a profitable business.
Hence the recent acquisitions by both Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dell, of course, shelled out a …
HPE Buys Its Way Into Virtual Networking With Plexxi was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
One of the most important lessons in marketing is that you don’t change something that is working, but that you also have to be able to carefully and cautiously innovate to protect against changing tastes or practices that might also spell doom for the business.
Two and a half decades ago, Coca-Cola famously made a mistake in trying to push New Coke, a different formula that was sweeter and more like Pepsi, replacing the original Coke, which had to be brought back as Coke Classic and which, eventually, killed off New Coke completely. Coca-Cola was not just changing things for …
CoreOS Is New Linux, Not A RHEL Classic Killer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.