There is something to be said for being at the right place at the right time.
While there were plenty of folks who were in the exact wrong spot when the financial crisis hit in 2007-2008, some technologies were uniquely well timed to meet the unexpected demands of a new era.
In the aftermath of the crash, major investment banks and financial institutions had a tough task ahead to keep up with the wave of regulations instituted to keep them straight. This has some serious procedural impacts, and also came with some heady new demands on compute infrastructure. Post-regulation, investment …
For Big Banks, Regulation is the Mother of GPU Invention was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
In the server virtualization era, there were a couple of virtual machine formats and hypervisors to match them, and despite the desire for a common VM format, the virtual server stacks got siloed into ESXi, KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V stacks with some spicing of PowerVM, Solaris containers and LDOMs, and VM/ESA partitions sprinkled on.
With containers, the consensus has been largely to support the Docker format that was inspired by the foundational Linux container work done by Google, and Docker, the company, was the early and enthusiastic proponent of its way of the Docker way of doing containers.
Now, Docker …
Docker Reaches The Enterprise Milestone was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Cloud computing makes a lot of sense for a rapidly growing number of larger enterprises and other organizations, and for any number of reasons. The increased application flexibility and agility engendered by creating a pool of shared infrastructure resources, the scalability and the cost efficiencies, are all key drivers in an era of ever-embiggening data.
With public and hybrid cloud environments, companies can offload the integration, deployment and management of the infrastructure to a third party, taking the pressure off their own IT staffs, and in private and hybrid cloud environments, they can keep their most business-critical data securely behind …
Microsoft, Stanford Researchers Tweak Cloud Economics Framework was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
So, who was the biggest revenue generator, and showing the largest growth in sales, for servers in the final quarter of 2016? Was it Hewlett Packard Enterprise? Was it Dell Technologies? Was it IBM or Cisco Systems or one of the ODMs? Nope. It was the Others category comprised of dozens of vendors that sit outside of the top tier OEMs we know by name and the collective ODMs of the world who some of us know by name.
This is a sign that the server ecosystem is getting more diverse under pressure as the technical and economic climate changes …
Server Makers Try To Adapt To A Harsher Climate was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It’s an unavoidable truth of information technology that the operators and users are sometimes at odds with each other.
Countless stories, comics, and television shows have driven home two very unpleasant stereotypes: the angry, unhelpful system administrator who can’t wait to say “no!” to a user request, and the clueless, clumsy user always a keystroke away from taking down the entire infrastructure. There is a kernel of truth to them. While both resource providers and resource users may want the same end result — the successful completion of computational tasks — they have conflicting priorities when it comes to achieving …
Solving HPC Conflicts with Containers was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Just five years ago, the infrastructure space was awash in stories about the capabilities cooked into the Hadoop platform—something that was, even then, only a few pieces of code cobbled onto the core HDFS distributed storage with MapReduce serving as the processing engine for analytics at scale.
At the center of many of the stories was Cloudera, the startup that took Hadoop to the enterprise with its commercial distribution of the open source framework. As we described in a conversation last year marking the ten-year anniversary of Hadoop with Doug Cutting, one of its creators at Yahoo, the platform …
Looking Down The Long Enterprise Road With Hadoop was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
There is an adage, not quite yet old, suggesting that compute is free but storage is not. Perhaps a more accurate and, as far as public clouds are concerned, apt adaptation of this saying might be that computing and storage are free, and so are inbound networking within a region, but moving data across regions in a public cloud is brutally expensive, and it is even more costly spanning regions.
So much so that, at a certain scale, it makes sense to build your own datacenter and create your own infrastructure hardware and software stack that mimics the salient characteristics …
Bouncing Back To Private Clouds With OpenStack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Large enterprises are embracing NVM-Express flash as the storage technology of choice for their data intensive and often highly unpredictable workloads. NVM-Express devices bring with them high performance – up to 1 million I/O operations per second – and low latency – less than 100 microseconds. And flash storage now has high capacity, too, making it a natural fit for such datacenter applications.
As we have discussed here before, all-flash arrays are quickly becoming mainstream, particularly within larger enterprises, as an alternative to disk drives in environments where tens or hundreds of petabytes of data – rather than the …
Making Remote NVM-Express Flash Look Local And Fast was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Exascale computing, which has been long talked about, is now – if everything remains on track – only a few years away. Billions of dollars are being spent worldwide to develop systems capable of an exaflops of computation, which is 50 times the performance of the most capacious systems the current Top500 supercomputer rankings and will usher in the next generation of HPC workloads.
As we have talked about at The Next Platform, China is pushing ahead with three projects aimed at delivering exascale systems to the market, with a prototype – dubbed the Tianhe-3 – being prepped for …
AMD Researchers Eye APUs For Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
With a new generation of Xeon processors coming out later this year from Intel and AMD trying to get back in the game with its own X86 server chips – they probably will not be called Opterons – it is not a surprise to us that server makers are having a bit of trouble making their numbers in recent months. But we are beginning to wonder if something else might be going on here than the usual pause before a big set of processor announcements.
In many ways, server spending is a leading indicator because when companies are willing to …
Mixed Signals From Server Land was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Computed tomography (CT) is a widely-used process in medicine and industry. Many X-ray images taken around a common axis of rotation are combined to create a three-dimensional view of an object, including the interior.
In medicine, this technique is commonly used for non-invasive diagnostic applications such as searching for cancerous masses. Industrial applications include examining metal components for stress fractures and comparing produced materials to the original computer-aided design (CAD) specifications. While this process provides invaluable insight, it also presents an analytical challenge.
State-of-the-art CT scanners use synchrotron light, which enables very fine resolution in four dimensions. For example, the …
Scaling Compute to Meet Large-Scale CT Scan Demands was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Cloud computing in its various forms is often pitched as a panacea of sorts for organizations that are looking to increase the flexibility of their data and to drive down costs associated with their IT infrastructures. And for many, the benefits are real.
By offloading many of their IT tasks – from processing increasingly large amounts of data to storing all that data – to cloud providers, companies can take the money normally spent in building out and managing their internal IT infrastructures and put it toward other important business efforts. In addition, by having their data in an easily …
Financial Institutions Weigh Risks, Benefits of Cloud Migration was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Moore’s Law has been the driving force behind computer evolution for more than five decades, fueling the relentless innovation that led to more transistors being added to increasingly smaller processors that rapidly increased the performance of computing while at the same time driving down the cost.
Fifty-plus years later, as the die continues to shrink, there are signs that Moore’s Law is getting more difficult to keep up with. For example, Intel – the keeper of the Moore’s Law flame – has pushed back the transition from 14-nanometers to 10nm by more than a year as it worked through issues …
A Glimmer of Light Against Dark Silicon was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The idea of bringing compute and memory functions in computers closer together physically within the systems to accelerate the processing of data is not a new one.
Some two decades ago, vendors and researchers began to explore the idea of processing-in-memory (PIM), the concept of placing compute units like CPUs and GPUs closer together to help reduce to the latency and cost inherent in transferring data, and building prototypes with names like EXECUBE, IRAM, DIVA and FlexRAM. For HPC environments that relied on data-intensive applications, the idea made a lot of sense. Reduce the distance between where data was …
Promises, Challenges Ahead for Near-Memory, In-Memory Processing was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
One way to characterize the challenges of achieving exascale, is to look at how advancing compute, memory/storage, software, and fabric will lead to a future-generation balanced system. Recently Al Gara of Intel, Jean-Philippe Nominé of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and Katherine Riley of Argonne National Lab were on a panel that weighed in on these and a host of other interrelated challenges.
Exascale will represent a watershed achievement in computer science. More than just a nice, round number (“exa-” denotes a billion billion), exascale computing is also supposed1 by the Human Brain Project and …
Exascale Leaders on Next Horizons in Supercomputing was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
During the past decade, enterprises have begun using machine learning (ML) to collect and analyze large amounts of data to obtain a competitive advantage. Now some are looking to go even deeper – using a subset of machine learning techniques called deep learning (DL), they are seeking to delve into the more esoteric properties hidden in the data. The goal is to create predictive applications for such areas as fraud detection, demand forecasting, click prediction, and other data-intensive analyses.
The computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and audio recognition applications being developed using DL techniques need large amounts of …
Current Trends in Tools for Large-Scale Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
There is an old joke that in the post-apocalyptic world that comes about because of plague or nuclear war, only two things will be left alive: cockroaches and Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones. As it hails from New York City, you can understand why Cockroach Labs, the upstart software company that is cloning Google’s Spanner distributed relational database, chose that particular bug to epitomize a system that will stay alive no matter what. But, they could have just as easily called it RichardsDB.
When discussing Google’s cloud implementation of Spanner, which launched in beta earlier this …
Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
When it comes to solving deep learning cluster and software stack problems at scale, few companies are riding the bleeding edge like Chinese search giant, Baidu. As we have detailed in the past, the company’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) has some unique hardware and framework implementations that put AI to the test at scale. As it turns out, scalability of the models they specialize in (beginning with speech recognition) is turning out to be one of the great challenges ahead on all fronts—hardware, compiler/runtime, and framework alike.
As we have described across multiple use cases, at Baidu and elsewhere …
Baidu Targets Deep Learning Scalability Challenges was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Whether being built for capacity or capability, the conventional wisdom about memory provisioning on the world’s fastest systems is changing quickly. The rise of 3D memory has thrown a curveball into the field as HPC centers consider the specific tradeoffs between traditional, stacked, and hybrid combinations of both on next-generation supercomputers. In short, allocating memory on these machines is always tricky—with a new entrant like stacked memory into the design process, it is useful to gauge where 3D devices might fit.
While stacked memory is getting a great deal of airplay, for some HPC application areas, it might fall just …
3D Memory Sparks New Thinking in HPC System Design was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Many oil and gas exploration shops have invested many years and many more millions of dollars into homegrown codes, which is critical internally (competitiveness, specialization, etc.) but leaves gaps in the ability to quickly exploit new architectures that could lead to better performance and efficiency.
That tradeoff between architectural agility and continuing to scale a complex, in-house base of codes is one that many companies with HPC weigh—and as one might imagine, oil and gas giant, ExxonMobil is no different.
The company came to light last week with news that it scaled one of its mission-critical simulation codes on the …
Inside Exxon’s Effort to Scale Homegrown Codes, Keep Architectural Pace was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.