Putting more and more cores on a single CPU and then having two CPUs in a standard workhorse server is something that yields the best price/performance for certain kinds of compute-hungry workloads, and these days, particularly those who want top bin Xeon parts and the cost of the processor is no object because it saves on the total number of server nodes that has to be deployed.
But this is not the only way to pack the most compute density into a rack. A case can be made for middle bin parts, particularly for workloads that scale well across many …
Battle For Datacenter Compute: Qualcomm Centriq Versus Intel Xeon was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
One of the more significant efforts in Europe to address the challenges of the convergence of high performance computing (HPC), high performance data analytics (HPDA) and soon artificial intelligence (AI), and ensure that researchers are equipped and familiar with the latest technology, is happening in France at GENCI (Grand équipement national de calcul intensif).
Grand équipement national de calcul intensif (GENCI) is a “civil company” (société civile) under French law and 49% owned by the State, represented by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI), 20% by the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux énergies alternatives ( …
GENCI: Advancing HPC in France and Across Europe was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Downtime has been plaguing companies for decades, and the problems have only been exacerbated during the internet era and with the rise of ecommerce and the cloud.
Systems crash, money is lost because no one is buying anything, more money is spent on the engineers and the time they need to fix the problem and get things back online. In the meantime, enterprises have to deal with frustrated customers and risk losing many of them, who lose trust the in the company and opt to move their business elsewhere. For much of that time, the response to system failures has …
Creating Chaos to Save the Datacenter was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Burst buffers are carving out a significant space for themselves in the HPC arena as a way to improve data checkpointing and application performance at a time when traditional storage technologies are struggling to keep up with the increasingly large and complex workloads including traditional simulation and modeling and new things like as data analytics.
The fear has been that storage technologies such as parallel file systems could become the bottleneck that limits performance, and burst buffers have been designed to manage peak I/O situations so that organizations aren’t forced to scale their storage environments to be able to support …
Burst Buffers Blow Through I/O Bottlenecks was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
In his keynote at the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon vice president and chief technology officer Werner Vogels said that the cloud had created a “egalitarian” computing environment where everyone has access to the same compute, storage, and analytics, and that the real differentiator for enterprises will be the data they generate, and more importantly, the value the enterprises derive from that data.
For Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, data is the focus. The company is putting considerable muscle behind data analytics, machine learning, and what it calls more generally cognitive computing, much of it based …
Put Building Data Culture Ahead Of Buying Data Analytics was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Kubernetes has quickly become a key technology in the emerging containerized application environment since it was first announced by Google engineers just more than three years ago, catching hold as the primary container orchestration tool used by hyperscalers, HPC organizations and enterprises and overshadowing similar tools like Docker Swarm, Mesos and OpenStack.
Born from earlier internal Google projects Borg and Omega, the open-source Kubernetes has been embraced by top cloud providers and growing numbers of enterprises, and support is growing among datacenter infrastructure software vendors.
Red Hat has built out its OpenShift cloud application platform based on both …
No Slowdown in Sight for Kubernetes was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Object storage may not have been born in the cloud, but it was the major public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform that have been its biggest drivers.
The idea of object storage wasn’t new; it had been around for about two decades. But as the cloud service providers began building out their datacenters and platforms more than a decade ago, they were faced with the need to find a storage architecture that could scale to meet the demands brought on by the massive amounts of data being created, and as well as the …
Bridging Object Storage And NAS In The Enterprise was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
One of the most interesting and strategically located datacenters in the world has taken a shining to HPC, and not just because it is a great business opportunity. Rather, Verne Global is firing up an HPC system rental service in its Icelandic datacenter because its commercial customers are looking for supercomputer-style systems that they can rent rather than buy to augment their existing HPC jobs.
Verne Global, which took over a former NATO airbase and an Allied strategic forces command center outside of Keflavik, Iceland back in 2012 and converted it into a super-secure datacenter, is this week taking the …
Renting The Cleanest HPC On Earth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Qualcomm launched its Centriq server system-on-chip (SoC) a few weeks ago. The event filled in Centriq’s tech specs and pricing, and disclosed a wide range of ecosystem partners and customers. I wrote about Samsung’s process and customer testimonials for Centriq elsewhere.
Although Qualcomm was launching its Centriq 2400 processor, instead of focusing on a bunch of reference design driven hardware partners, Qualcomm chose to focus its Centriq launch event on ecosystem development, with a strong emphasis on software workloads and partnerships. Because so much of today’s cloud workload mix is based on runtime environments – using containers, interpretive languages, …
Deep Dive Into Qualcomm’s Centriq Arm Server Ecosystem was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
VMware jumped into burgeoning software-defined networking (SDN) field in a big way four years ago when it bought started Nicira for $1.26 billion, a deal that led to the launch of VMware’s NSX offering a year later. NSX put the company on a crash course with other networking vendors, particularly Cisco Systems, all of whom were trying to plot their strategies to deal with the rapid changes in what had been a relatively staid part of the industry.
Many of these vendors had made their billions over the years selling expensive appliance-style boxes filled with proprietary technologies, and now faced …
VMware Tweaks NSX Virtual Networks For Containers, Microservices was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The server race is really afoot now that IBM has finally gotten off the starting blocks with its first Power9 system, based on its “Nimbus” variant of that processor and turbocharged with the latest “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia and EDR InfiniBand networks from Mellanox Technologies.
The machine launched today, known variously as by the code-name “Witherspoon” or “Newell,” is the building block of the CORAL systems being deployed by the US Department of Energy – “Summit” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and “Sierra” at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But more importantly, the Witherspoon system represents a new …
Power9 To The People was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Moving large-scale enterprise operations into the cloud is not a decision to be made lightly. There are engineering and financial considerations, and the process of determining the costs pros and cons of such a move is significantly more complex than simply comparing the expense of running a workload on-premises or in a public cloud.
Still, the trend is toward businesses making the move to one degree or another, driven by the easy ability to scale up or down depending on the workload and paying only for the infrastructure resources they use, not having to put up the capital expense to …
FICO CIO on the Costs, Concerns of Cloud Transition was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Striking acceptable training times for GPU accelerated machine learning on very large datasets has long-since been a challenge, in part because there are limited options with constrained on-board GPU memory.
For those who are working on training against massive volumes (in the many millions to billions of examples) using cloud infrastructure, the impetus is greater than ever to pare down training time given the per-hour instance costs and for cloud-based GPU acceleration on hardware with more memory (the more expensive Nvidia P100 with 16 GB memory over a more standard 8 GB memory GPU instance). Since hardware limitations are not …
Faster Machine Learning in a World with Limited Memory was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
It has been a long time coming, but hyperconverged storage pioneer Nutanix is finally letting go of hardware, shifting from being an a server-storage hybrid appliance maker to a company that sells software that provides hyperconverged functionality on whatever hardware large enterprises typically buy.
The move away from selling appliances was something that The Next Platform has been encouraging Nutanix to do to broaden its market appeal, but until the company reached a certain level of demand from customers, Nutanix had to restrict its hardware support matrix so it could affordably put a server-storage stack in the field and not …
Disaggregated Or Hyperconverged, What Storage Will Win The Enterprise? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
We’ve all grown up in a world of digital filing cabinets. POSIX I/O has enabled code portability and extraordinary advances in computation, but it is limited by its design and the way it mirrors the paper offices that it has replaced.
The POSIX API and its implementation assumes that we know roughly where our data is, that accessing it is reasonably quick and that all versions of the data are the same. As we move to exascale, we need to let go of this model and embrace a sea of data and a very different way of handling it.
In …
When POSIX I/O Meets Exascale, Do the Old Rules Apply? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
In many ways, public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform can be the great equalizers, giving enterprises access to computing and storage resources that they may not have the money to be able to bring into their on-premises environments. Given the new compute-intensive workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the benefits they can bring to modern businesses, this access to cloud-based platforms is increasingly critical to large enterprises.
Cloudera for several years has been pushing its software offerings – such as Data Science Workbench, Analytic DB, Operational DB, and Enterprise Data Hub – …
Cloudera Puffs Up Analytics Database For Clouds was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The slowdown in server sales ahead of Intel’s July launch of the “Skylake” Xeon SP was real, and if the figures from the third quarter of this year are any guide, then it looks like that slump is over. Plenty of customers wanted the shiny new Skylake gear, and we think a fair number of them also wanted to buy older-generation “Broadwell” Xeons and the “Grantley” server platform given the premium that Intel is charging for Skylake processors and their “Purley” platform.
Server makers with older Broadwell machinery in the barn were no doubt happy to oblige customers and clear …
The Booming Server Market In The Wake Of Skylake was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hyperconverged infrastructure is a relatively small but fast-growing part of the datacenter market, driving in large part by enterprises looking to simplify and streamline their environments as they tackle increasingly complex workloads.
Like converged infrastructure, hyperconverged offerings are modular in nature, converging compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software into a tightly integrated single solution that drives greater datacenter densities, smaller footprints, rapid deployment and lower costs. They are pre-built, pre-validated before shipping from the factory, eliminating the need for the user to do the necessary and time-consuming integration. Hyperconverged merges the compute and storage into a single unit, and …
Getting Hyper And Converged About Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It’d be difficult to downplay the impact Amazon Web Services has had on the computing industry over the past decade. Since launching in 2006, Amazon’s cloud computing division has become the set the pace in the public cloud market, rapidly growing out its capabilities from the first service – Simple Storage Service (S3) – it rolled out to now offering thousands of services that touch on everything from compute instances to databases, storage, application development and emerging technologies like machine learning and data analytics.
The company has become dominant by offering organizations of all sizes a way of simply accessing …
The Systems of the Future Will Be Conversational was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
For several years, GPU acceleration matched with Intel Xeon processors were the dominating news items in hardware at the annual Supercomputing Conference. However, this year that trend shifted in earnest, with a major coming-out party for ARM servers in HPC and more attention than ever paid to FPGAs as potential accelerators for future exascale systems.
The SC series held two days of lightening-round presentations on the state of FPGAs for future supercomputers, with insight from both academia, vendors, and end users at scale, including Microsoft. To say Microsoft is an FPGA user is a bit of an understatement, however, since …
Reinventing the FPGA Programming Wheel was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.