Everyone in the IT industry likes drama, and we here at The Next Platform are no different. But it is also important as the industry in undergoing gut-wrenching transformations, as it has been for five decades now and will probably do so for a decade or two more, to keep some perspective. While the public cloud is certainly an exciting part of the IT market, it hasn’t taken over the world even if it has become the dominant metaphor that all kinds of IT – public, private, and hybrid – aspired to mimic.
That’s something, and it is important. But …
Public Cloud Doesn’t Dominate IT Quite Yet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The potent combination of powerful CPUs, floating point laden GPU accelerators, and fast InfiniBand networking are coming to market and reshaping the upper echelons of supercomputing. While Intel is having issues with its future Knights massively parallel X86 processors, which it has not really explained, the two capability class supercomputers that are being built for the US Department of Energy by IBM with the help of Nvidia and Mellanox Technologies, named “Summit” and ‘Sierra” and installed at Oak Ridge National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are beginning to be assembled.
We have previously profiled the nodes in …
The Clever Machinations Of Livermore’s Sierra Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Red Hat has been aggressive in building out its capabilities around containers. The company last month unveiled its OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform for cloud native applications that added enhanced security features and greater consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
A couple of weeks later, Red Hat and Microsoft expanded their alliance to make it easier for organizations to adopt containers. Red Hat last year debuted OpenShift 3.0, which was based on the open source Kubernetes orchestration system and Docker containers, and the company has since continued to roll out enhancements to the platform.
The …
Red Hat Stretches Gluster Clustered Storage Under Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
During the dot-com boom, when Oracle was the dominant supplier of relational databases to startups and established enterprises alike, it used its profits to fund the acquisition of application serving middleware, notably BEA WebLogic, and then applications, such as PeopleSoft and Siebel, and then Java and hardware systems, from its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. It was an expensive proposition, but one that paid off handsomely for the software giant.
In the cloud and hyperscale era, open source middleware is the driving force and in a lot of cases there is nothing to acquire. Projects either go open themselves or are …
Oracle Emulates Google, AWS On Its Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Chip giant Intel has been talking about CPU-FPGA compute complexes for so long that it is hard to remember sometimes that its hybrid Xeon-Arria compute unit, which puts a Xeon server chip and a midrange FPGA into a single Xeon processor socket, is not shipping as a volume product. But Intel is working to get it into the field and has given The Next Platform an update on the current plan.
The hybrid CPU-FPGA devices, which are akin to AMD’s Accelerated Computing Units, or APUs, in that they put compute and, in this case, GPU acceleration into a single …
Intel Gears Up For FPGA Push was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Data analytics is a rapidly evolving field, and IBM and other vendors over the past several years have built numerous tools to address segments of it. But now Big Blue is shifting its focus to give data scientists and developers the technologies they need more easily and quickly analyze the data and derive insights that they can apply to their businesses strategies.
“We have [created] a ton of different products that solve parts of the problem,” Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, tells The Next Platform. “We’re moving toward a strategy of developing platforms for analytics. This trend …
IBM Brings Analytics To The Data For Faster Processing was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
In high performance computing in the public sector, dollars follow teraflops and now petaflops. Especially in the datacenters of academia, where cutting-edge computational research projects funded by large grants seek the most powerful supercomputers in the region.
Institutions with limited budgets these days are creatively solving their financial supercomputing needs by creating a collective that pools funds and shares computing resources. Some institutions, such as Iowa State University, are doing this internally, with various departments pitching in to buy a single, large HPC cluster, as with their Condo supercomputer.
In Japan, the University of Tokyo (U Tokyo) and University of …
How Oakforest-PACS Outpaced The K Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Microsoft is embedding Anaconda’s Python distribution into its Azure Machine Learning products, the latest move by the software vendor to expand its capabilities in the fast-growing artificial intelligence space and an example of Anaconda extending its reach beyond high performance computing and into AI.
The two companies announced the partnership this week at the Strata Data Conference in New York City, with the news dovetailing with other announcements around AI that Microsoft officials made this week at its own Ignite 2017 show. The vendors said they will offer Anaconda for Microsoft, which they described as a subset of the Anaconda …
Anaconda Teams With Microsoft In Machine Learning Push was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
In an age of ongoing digital advancement, leaders across all industries are seeking new ways to improve workplace productivity, ensure competitive advantage, and facilitate continued growth. Success hinges on their ability to accelerate time to value, and work more efficiently and effectively than the competition. Innovation and sustainability are key.
This is particularly true for the energy, oil, and gas (EOG) sector. As the global economy progressively moves away from fossil fuels in search of renewable resources, EOG companies are challenged to operate faster and smarter than ever before. Many organizations are utilizing high performance computing (HPC) technologies in order …
Harnessing Data Insights To Achieve Optimal Energy Consumption was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Announcements of new iron are exciting, but it doesn’t get real until customers beyond the handful of elite early adopters can get their hands on the gear.
Nvidia launched its “Volta” Tesla V100 GPU accelerators back in May, meeting and in some important ways exceeding most of its performance goals, and has been shipping devices, both in PCI-Express and SXM2 form factors, for a few months. Now, the ramp of this complex processor and its packaging of stacked High Bandwidth Memory – HMB2 from Samsung, to be specific – is progressing and the server OEMs and ODMs of the …
Volta GPU Accelerators Hit The Streets was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
This morning a presentation filtered from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science showing the roadmap to exascale with a 2021 machine at Argonne National Lab.
This is the Aurora machine, which had an uncertain future this year when its budgetary and other details were thrown into question. We understood the deal was being restructured and indeed it has. The system was originally slated to appear in 2018 with 180 petaflop potential. Now it is 1000 petaflops, an exascale capable machine, and will be delivered in 2021—right on target with the projected revised plans for exascale released earlier this …
Plans for First Exascale Supercomputer in U.S. Released was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute.
Network attached storage, as pioneered by NetApp, helped break those links between compute and storage in the enterprise at the file level. But it was the advent of storage area networks that allowed for storage to still be reasonably tightly coupled to servers and work at the lower block level, below file systems, while at the same time allowing that storage to scale independently from the number of disks you might jam into a single …
The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
High performance computing, long the domain of research centers and academia, is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream IT infrastructure and being opened up to a broader range of enterprise workloads, and in recent years, that includes big data analytics and machine learning. At the forefront of this expanded use is MasterCard, a financial services giant that is looking to drive the real-time business benefits of HPC.
As MasterCard has learned, however, alongside business value come additional needs around data protection. As HPC systems are more likely to hold customer-facing and other compliance related data, such infrastructure has the potential …
With Machine Learning, Can HPC Be Self Healing? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
MapR Technologies has been busy in recent years build out its capabilities as a data platform company that can support a broad range of open-source technologies, from Hadoop and Spark to Hive, and can reach from the data center through the edge and out into the cloud. At the center of its efforts is its Converged Data Platform, which comes with the MapR-FS Posix file system and includes enterprise-level database and storage that are designed to handle the emerging big data workloads.
At the Strata Data Conference in New York City Sept. 26, company officials are putting their focus …
MapR Bulks Up Database for Modern Apps was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
At Build 2017, Microsoft’s annual and influential developer event, CEO Satya Nadella introduced the idea of the “intelligent cloud” and “intelligent edge.” This vision of software’s immediate future considers the plethora of smart devices – cell phones, appliances, home environment controls, business machinery and the like – that permeate and, in large part, orchestrate our daily lives.
We all know about the Internet of Things. Today, the ability to glean valuable business insights from seemingly mundane device telemetry is impressive. Consider the case of the connected cows. Researchers at a farm attached pedometers to dairy cows, largely to monitor …
The Serverless Revolution Will Make Us All Developers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Microsoft announced Azure Stack at its Ignite event in September 2016 and soft-launched Azure Stack at its Inspire event in July, when it announced that the private cloud solution was available for customer orders. The first wave of Microsoft’s Azure Stack system partners – Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo – plan to ship their certified solutions to customers in September. We will be surprised if Microsoft does not announce first customer shipments with those vendors at Microsoft’s Ignite event in late September.
Azure Stack with compete with other hybrid private cloud frameworks, such as OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, HPE’s …
Azure Stack Finally Takes Microsoft Public Cloud Private was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The high performance computing world is set to become more diverse over the next several years on the hardware front, but for software development, this new array of ever-higher performance options creates big challenges for codes.
While the hardware advances might be moving too quick for long-standing software to take optimal advantage of, for some areas, things are at a relative standstill in terms of how to approach this future. Is it better to keep optimizing old codes that could be ticked along with the X86 tocks, or does a new architectural landscape mean starting from scratch with scientific codes–even …
Supercomputing Advancing Too Fast for Key Codes to Keep Pace was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
As an economic powerhouse and with a rising military and political presence around the world, you would expect, given the inherent political nature of supercomputing, that China would have multiple and massive supercomputing centers as well as a desire to spread its risk and demonstrate its technical breadth by investing in many different kinds of capability class supercomputers.
And this is precisely what China is doing, including creating its own offload accelerator, based on digital signal processors. This Matrix2000 DSP accelerator, which was unveiled at the ISC16 supercomputing event last year and which is being created by the National University …
China Arms Upgraded Tianhe-2A Hybrid Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
At the end of July, Oak Ridge National Laboratories started receiving the first racks of servers that will eventually be expanded to become the “Summit” supercomputer, the long-awaited replacement to the “Titan” hybrid CPU-GPU system that was built by Cray and installed back in the fall of 2012. So, technically speaking, IBM has begun shipping its Power9-based “Witherspoon” system, the kicker to the Power8-based “Minksy” machine that Big Blue unveiled in September 2016 as a precursor and a testbed for the Power9 iron.
Given that IBM is shipping Summit nodes to Oak Ridge and has also started shipping similar (but …
The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel is not the only system maker that is looking to converge its processor lines to make life a bit simpler for itself and for its customers as well as to save some money on engineering work. Oracle has just announced its Sparc M8 processor, and while this is an interesting chip, what is also interesting is that a Sparc T8 companion processor aimed at entry and midrange systems was not already introduced and does not appear to be in the works.
There is plenty a little weird here. The new Sparc T8 systems are, in fact, going to be …
Is M8 The Last Hurrah For Oracle Sparc? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.