The thing we hear time and time again from the hyperscalers is that technology is a differentiator, but supply chain can make or break them. Designing servers, storage, switching, and datacenters is fun, but if all of the pieces can’t be brought together at volume, and at a price that is the best in the industry, then their operations can’t scale.
It is with this in mind that we ponder Microsoft’s new “Project Olympus” hyperscale servers, which it debuted today at the Zettastructure conference in London. Or, to be more precise, the hyperscale server designs that it has created but …
Microsoft Azure Goes Back To Rack Servers With Project Olympus was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In the course of this three-part series on the challenges and opportunities for enterprise machine learning, we have worked to define the landscape and ecosystem for these workloads in large-scale business settings and have taken an in-depth look at some of the roadblocks on the path to more mainstream machine learning applications.
In this final part of the series, we will turn from pointing to the problems and look at the ways the barriers can be removed, both in terms of leveraging the technology ecosystem around machine learning and addressing more difficult problems, most notably, how to implement the human …
Mainstreaming Machine Learning: Emerging Solutions was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
We are pleased to announce that the first book from Next Platform Press, titled “The State of HPC Cloud: 2016 Edition” is complete. The printed book will be available on Amazon.com and other online bookstores in December, 2016. However, in the meantime, supercomputing cloud company, Nimbix, is backing an effort to offer a digital download edition for free for this entire week—from today, October 31 until November 6.
As you will note from looking at the Next Platform Press page, we have other books we will be delivering in a similar manner this year. However, that this is the …
The State of HPC Cloud in 2016 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
In part one of this series last week, we discussed the emerging ecosystem of machine learning applications and what promise those portend. But of course, as with any emerging application area (although to be fair, machine learning is not new), there are bound to be some barriers.
Even in analytically sophisticated organizations, machine learning often operates in “silos of expertise.” For example, the financial crimes unit in a bank may use advanced techniques to catch anti-money laundering; the credit risk team uses completely different and incompatible tools to predict loan defaults and set risk-based pricing; while treasury uses still other …
Major Roadblocks on the Path to Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Because space costs so much money and having multiple machines adds complexity and even more costs on top of that, there is always pressure to increase the density of the devices that provide compute, storage, and networking capacity in the datacenter. Moore’s Law, in essence, doesn’t just drive chips, but also the devices that are comprised of chips.
Often, it is the second or third iteration of a technology that takes off because the economics and density of the initial products can’t match the space and power constraints of a system rack. Such was the case with the initial 100 …
Broadcom Strikes 100G Ethernet Harder With Tomahawk-II was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Making storage cheaper on the cloud does not necessarily mean using tape or Blu-Ray discs to hold data. In a datacenter that has enormous bandwidth and consistent latency over a Clos network interconnecting hundreds of thousands of compute and storage servers, and by changing the durability and availability of data on the network and trading off storage costs and data access and movement costs, a hyperscaler can offer a mix of price and performance and cut costs.
That, in a nutshell, is what search engine giant and public cloud provider Google is doing with the latest variant of persistent storage …
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Making storage cheaper on the cloud does not necessarily mean using tape or Blu-Ray discs to hold data. In a datacenter that has enormous bandwidth and consistent latency over a Clos network interconnecting hundreds of thousands of compute and storage servers, and by changing the durability and availability of data on the network and trading off storage costs and data access and movement costs, a hyperscaler can offer a mix of price and performance and cut costs.
That, in a nutshell, is what search engine giant and public cloud provider Google is doing with the latest variant of persistent storage …
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Earlier this month, Samsung acquired Viv, the AI platform built by the creators of Siri that seeks to “open up the world of AI assistants to all developers.” The acquisition was largely overshadowed by the more high-profile news of Samsung’s struggles with its Galaxy Note smartphone, but make no mistake, this was a bold and impactful move by Samsung that aggressively launches the company into the future of smart, AI-enabled devices.
Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus makes a compelling argument for why Samsung’s ecosystem serves as an invaluable launching pad for Viv’s goal of ubiquity – the electronics giant’s …
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Earlier this month, Samsung acquired Viv, the AI platform built by the creators of Siri that seeks to “open up the world of AI assistants to all developers.” The acquisition was largely overshadowed by the more high-profile news of Samsung’s struggles with its Galaxy Note smartphone, but make no mistake, this was a bold and impactful move by Samsung that aggressively launches the company into the future of smart, AI-enabled devices.
Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus makes a compelling argument for why Samsung’s ecosystem serves as an invaluable launching pad for Viv’s goal of ubiquity – the electronics giant’s …
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The chip industry is quickly reaching the limits of traditional lithography in its effort to cram more transistors onto a piece of silicon at a pace consistent with Moore’s Law. Accordingly, new approaches, including using extreme ultraviolet light sources, are being developed. While this can promise new output for chipmakers, developing this technology to enhance future computing is going to take a lot of supercomputing.
Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Dr. Fred Streitz and his teams at the HPC Innovation Center at LLNL are working with Dutch semiconductor company, ASML, to push advances in lithography for next-generation chips. Even as a …
It Takes a Lot of Supercomputing to Simulate Future Computing was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The chip industry is quickly reaching the limits of traditional lithography in its effort to cram more transistors onto a piece of silicon at a pace consistent with Moore’s Law. Accordingly, new approaches, including using extreme ultraviolet light sources, are being developed. While this can promise new output for chipmakers, developing this technology to enhance future computing is going to take a lot of supercomputing.
Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Dr. Fred Streitz and his teams at the HPC Innovation Center at LLNL are working with Dutch semiconductor company, ASML, to push advances in lithography for next-generation chips. Even as a …
It Takes a Lot of Supercomputing to Simulate Future Computing was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
For a topic that generates so much interest, it is surprisingly difficult to find a concise definition of machine learning that satisfies everyone. Complicating things further is the fact that much of machine learning, at least in terms of its enterprise value, looks somewhat like existing analytics and business intelligence tools.
To set the course for this three-part series that puts the scope of machine learning into enterprise context, we define machine learning as software that extracts high-value knowledge from data with little or no human supervision. Academics who work in formal machine learning theory may object to a …
The State of Enterprise Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
For a topic that generates so much interest, it is surprisingly difficult to find a concise definition of machine learning that satisfies everyone. Complicating things further is the fact that much of machine learning, at least in terms of its enterprise value, looks somewhat like existing analytics and business intelligence tools.
To set the course for this three-part series that puts the scope of machine learning into enterprise context, we define machine learning as software that extracts high-value knowledge from data with little or no human supervision. Academics who work in formal machine learning theory may object to a …
The State of Enterprise Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Chip design firm ARM is getting into the cloud business. The company whose designs power almost all of the world’s cell phones, has steadily pushed its designs into new ventures, including servers, as we have covered extensively. But on Tuesday it branched into something completely different.
It is selling cloud services to help a new breed of customers such as appliance makers connect devices to the internet of things in a secure fashion. The ARM mbed cloud is now available for customers that want to create a connected device that is easier to secure, track and get online.
The …
ARM Carves Path to IoT Driven Cloud Business was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Chip design firm ARM is getting into the cloud business. The company whose designs power almost all of the world’s cell phones, has steadily pushed its designs into new ventures, including servers, as we have covered extensively. But on Tuesday it branched into something completely different.
It is selling cloud services to help a new breed of customers such as appliance makers connect devices to the internet of things in a secure fashion. The ARM mbed cloud is now available for customers that want to create a connected device that is easier to secure, track and get online.
The …
ARM Carves Path to IoT Driven Cloud Business was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
What happens to the datacenter when a trillion devices embedded in every manner of product and facility are chatting away with each other, trying to optimize the world? There is a very good chance that the raw amount of computing needed to chew on that data at the edge, in the middle, and in a datacenter – yes, we will still have datacenters – will absolutely explode.
The supply chain for datacenters – including the ARM collective — is absolutely counting on exponential growth in sensors, which ARM Holding’s top brass and its new owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, spent …
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
What happens to the datacenter when a trillion devices embedded in every manner of product and facility are chatting away with each other, trying to optimize the world? There is a very good chance that the raw amount of computing needed to chew on that data at the edge, in the middle, and in a datacenter – yes, we will still have datacenters – will absolutely explode.
The supply chain for datacenters – including the ARM collective — is absolutely counting on exponential growth in sensors, which ARM Holding’s top brass and its new owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, spent …
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The gap in the appetite for new computing technology between enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders is widening, but no one is talking about causality quite yet even though there is probably some link between the rise of clouds and more conservative spending on the part of enterprises.
But there is, perhaps, another cause. It could just be that the growth in traditional computing in the enterprise that is dedicated to things like print, file, web, email, and database serving is now less than the Moore’s Law increases that are enabled by process shrinks at the fabs run by Intel. …
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The gap in the appetite for new computing technology between enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders is widening, but no one is talking about causality quite yet even though there is probably some link between the rise of clouds and more conservative spending on the part of enterprises.
But there is, perhaps, another cause. It could just be that the growth in traditional computing in the enterprise that is dedicated to things like print, file, web, email, and database serving is now less than the Moore’s Law increases that are enabled by process shrinks at the fabs run by Intel. …
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Over the last couple of years, we have been watching how burst buffers might be deployed at some of the world’s largest supercomputer sites. For some background on how these SSD devices boost throughput on large machines and aid in both checkpoint and application acceleration, you can read here, but the real question is how these might penetrate the market outside of the leading supercomputing sites.
There is clear need for burst buffer technology in other areas where users are matching a parallel file system with SSDs. While that is still an improvement over the disk days, a lot …
How Long Before Burst Buffers Push Past Supercomputing? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.