If you want to build infrastructure that scales larger than a single image of a server and an operating system, you have no choice but to network together multiple machines. And so, the network becomes a kind of hyper backplane between compute elements and, in many cases, also a kind of virtual peripheral bus for things like disk and flash storage. From the outside, a warehouse-scale computer, as Google has been calling them for nearly a decade, is meant to look and behave like one machine even if it most certainly is not.
It is hard to quantify how …
For Google Networks, Predictable Latency Trumps Everything was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
When enterprises talk about cloud computing, they invariably talk about hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Not all of their workloads will run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform – or only on one public cloud, for that matter.
In highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, some workloads will run in private clouds hosted by the enterprises themselves for compliance, security, and privacy reasons. Companies that have invested millions of dollars in their datacenters over the years also will want to protect those investments by leveraging them for private clouds. What’s important to them is being …
IBM Builds Private Cloud Stack With Kubernetes And Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The general HPC market might be growing, and the very definition of HPC is expanding thanks to the addition of advanced analytics and machine learning to the HPC toolbox. But it is tough slogging right now in the upper echelons of HPC where supercomputers roam.
There is perhaps no better barometer of the state of supercomputing than Cray, which sells a mix of processing, storage, and interconnect technologies to address the ever-widening scope of modern supercomputing. Because of a general slowdown in supercomputer sales thanks to the fact that organizations are keeping their systems around for longer than they usually …
Cray Looks Forward To Supercomputing Rebound was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If you want to get a microcosmic view of the epic battle between Ethernet and InfiniBand (which also includes Omni-Path no matter how much Intel protests) as they relate to high performance computing in its many modern guises, there is perhaps no better place to look at what Mellanox Technologies is selling.
Mellanox, which has been peddling InfiniBand chips, switches, and adapters since the inception of this technology, bought its biggest rival in switch sales, Voltaire, for $218 million back in November 2010. And that was perhaps its smartest move right up to the moment where the company launched …
The Tug Of War Between InfiniBand And Ethernet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
GPU accelerated supercomputing is not a new phenomenon with many high performance computing codes already primed to run on Nvidia hardware in particular.
However, for some legacy codes with special needs (changing models, high computational demands), particularly in areas like weather, the gap between those codes and the promise of GPU acceleration is rather large, even with higher level tools like OpenACC to bridge the divide—all without major code rewrites.
Given the limitations of porting some legacy Fortran codes to GPUs, a research team Tokyo Tech has devised what it calls, “hybrid Fortran” which is designed to “increase productivity when …
Hybrid Fortran Pulls Legacy Codes into Acceleration Era was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Although much of the attention around deep learning for voice has focused on speech recognition, developments in artificial speech synthesis (text to speech) based on neural network approaches have been just as swift.
The goal with text-to-speech (TTS), as in other voice-related deep learning areas, is to get the training and inference times way down to allow for fast delivery of services and low power consumption and utilization of hardware resources. A recent effort at Chinese search giant, Baidu, which is at often at the forefront of deep learning for voice recognition and TTS, has shown remarkable progress on both …
Deep Voice 3: Ten Million Queries on a Single GPU Server was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The cloud gives, and it takes away.
The big hyperscalers, public cloud builders, and telecom, wireless, and cable service providers who are all collectively called “cloud” when it comes to the infrastructure they build, and they are increasingly driving shipments and revenues of all manner of components. But they command, by virtue of their huge volumes, discounts that are much deeper than the typical enterprise customer can get when they buy through an OEM or, if they are large enough, an ODM.
The fact that Intel’s Data Center Group is managing to profit pretty handsomely and reasonably predictably despite this …
Intel’s Data Center Group Has Its Head In The Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
For quantum computing to make the leap from theory and slim early use cases to broader adoption, a programmability jump is required. Some of the first hurdles have been knocked over in the last few weeks with new compiler and API-based development efforts that abstract some of the complex physics required for both qubit and gate-based approaches to quantum devices.
The more public recent effort was the open source publication of OpenFermion, a quantum compiler based on work at Google and quantum startup, Rigetti Computing, that is focused on applications in quantum chemistry and materials science. OpenFermion is …
One Step Closer to Easier Quantum Programming was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Seymour Cray loved vector supercomputers, and made the second part of that term a household word because of it. NEC, the last of the pure vector supercomputer makers, is so excited about its new “Aurora” SX-10+ vector processor and the “Tsubasa” supercomputer that will use it that it forgot to announce the processor to the world when it previewed the system this week.
Here at The Next Platform, we easily forgive such putting of carts before horses – so long as someone eventually explains the horse to us before the cart starts shipping for real. NEC is expected to …
Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It must be tough for the hyperscalers that are expanding into public cloud and the public cloud builders that also use their datacenters to run their own businesses to decide whether to hoard all of the new technologies that they can get their hands on for their own benefit, or to make money selling that capacity to others.
For any new, and usually constrained, kind of capacity, such as shiny new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel or “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia, it has to be a hard call for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to …
AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hybrid clouds may be the direction many enterprises are heading in, but it is a path fraught with challenges.
Organizations may want to run some workloads in public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or IBM while keeping others in house on public clouds for such reasons ranging from security and privacy to protecting datacenter investments and regulatory compliance. The complexity and difficulty come in being able to easily and securely move workloads between the two environments and managing both in a streamlined way.
However, that is the direction many enterprises are going. IDC analysts found …
Google And Cisco Cross Pollenate A Hybrid Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It is hard to quantify the amount of effort in systems and application software development that has been done precisely because there is no easy, efficient, and cheap way to make a bunch of cheap commodity servers look like one wonking system with a big ole flat memory space that is as easy to program as a PC but which brings to bear all that compute, memory, and I/O of a cluster as a single system image.
We have SMP and NUMA glue chips to do such shared memory clustering in hardware, scaling from two to four and sometimes eight, …
The Dream Of Software Only Shared Memory Clusters was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The talk about ARM-based servers pushing their way into the datacenter has been going for almost a decade now, during which time we have seen companies like Samsung drop their interest before they really got going on it and others like AMD getting an ARM-based chip out but then turning their attention to other initiatives.
We have also seen vendors like Cavium and Applied Micro get chips to market with some levels of adoption. Top system OEMs like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Cray are using these chips to various degrees in commercially available or test servers. And the …
Qualcomm Builds Momentum For Centriq ARM Server Chip was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Today’s enterprises need deep learning, but most don’t know how to get started. As rising data volumes and evolving industry trends push the limits of traditional IT, the latest innovations are helping them operate faster and smarter—and high performance computing is just the beginning.
Enterprises are deploying robust server platforms to power HPC applications, leveraging optimal performance, reliability, and flexibility to handle increasingly dense workloads. And with these industry-leading tools, modeling and simulation capabilities are rapidly evolving. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we operate and relate to technology. AI allows machines to think and learn like the human brain, while …
HPE Demystifies Deep Learning For Faster Intelligence was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Graph querying of data housed in massive data lakes and data warehouses has been part of the big data and analytics scene for many years, but it hasn’t always been a particularly easy process. Understanding with graphs has in many ways been a highly manual process, and not all data scientists have had access to the Cypher graph database query language. Executives at graph company Neo4j are looking to change that.
At the GraphConnect New York show this week, Neo4j announced it has donated an early version of its Cypher for Apache Spark language toolkit to the openCypher project, a …
Connecting The Dots With Graph Databases was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
This summer, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) added to its roster another of the world’s most powerful high performance computing systems. The Barcelona Computing Center’s new MareNostrum 4, delivered by IBM with the help of partners Lenovo and Fujitsu, and fueled by HPC technologies from Intel, will facilitate extensive engineering and scientific research in fields like astrophysics, weather forecasting, and genome research. Nestled within a unique building – the Torre Girona chapel, which fell out of use – the fourth generation MareNostrum system relies on a general purpose cluster working with three specialized clusters to achieve its …
BSC Builds 21st Century HPC In A 19th Century Cathedral was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Supercomputer maker Cray is always looking for ways to extend its reach outside of the traditional academic and government markets where the biggest deals are often made.
From its forays into graph analytics appliances and more recently, machine and deep learning, the company has potential to exploit its long history building some of the world’s fastest machines. This has expanded into some new ventures wherein potential new Cray users can try on the company’s systems, including via an on-demand partnership with datacenter provider, Markley, and now, inside of Microsoft’s Azure datacenters.
For Microsoft Azure cloud users looking to bolster modeling …
Cray Supercomputers One Step Closer to Cloud Users was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Intel’s multi-year effort to expand its reach beyond its PC and server processor roots has taken the chip maker down multiple paths, some of which have ended in dead ends.
The most memorable of those was the billion-plus-dollar attempt to challenge ARM Holdings and its various partners – such as Qualcomm and Samsung – in making chips for mobile devices. Under current CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel has retrenched, dropping its mobile device efforts and pulling back from wearables, and instead is pushing to provide the foundational technologies that will underpin the trends that will continue to shape the industry, from …
Intel Pumps Funds Into Data Processing In All Shapes And Sizes was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
For the past five and a half years, which is not quite an eternity in the IT business but is something akin to a half of a generation or so, IBM’s revenues have been declining, quarter in and quarter out. As has happened many, many times in its more than century of existence, Big Blue, which used to be a peddler of meat slicers, time machines, scales, and punch card tabulators early in its history, has had to constantly evolve and reimagine itself.
The transformation that IBM had to undergo in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a near …
The IBM Transformation Can Gather Steam Now was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
No one knows better than IBM that the time, money, energy, and risk associated with changing platforms can hinder that change. In some cases, as with the System z mainframe, this helps the company preserve its footprint in the datacenter. But in other cases, it hurts IBM’s ability to get people to try out different public or private infrastructure.
It is no secret that Big Blue wants a much bigger cloud business, and that it got a late start compared to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But IBM does have a presence at most of the large companies on earth, and …
Easing Enterprise Migration To The Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.