It is a coincidence, but one laden with meaning, that Nvidia is setting new highs selling graphics processors at the same time that SGI, one of the early innovators in the fields of graphics and supercomputing, is being acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Nvidia worked up from GPUs for gaming PCs to supercomputers, and has spread its technology to deep learning, visualization, and virtual desktops, all with much higher margins than GPUs for PCs or any other client device could deliver. SGI, in its various incarnations, stayed at the upper echelons of computing where there is, to a certain …
Deep Learning Drives Nvidia’s Tesla Business To New Highs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Rajeeb Hazra, VP of Intel’s Datacenter Group, is a car buff. Why is that important to HPC? Because autonomous cars are the future, and it will take a phenomenal amount of compute to support them.
Hazra recently shared that some estimates to accurately support 20,000 autonomous cars would require an exaflop of sustained compute. This level of supercomputing is needed, considering the network of millions of sensors inside and outside the cars and their interpretation, plus the deep learning needed to constantly stay aware of the world around them and the drivers inside them, and repeatedly pass new models to …
Intel’s VP of Datacenter Group on “AI—and More—on IA” was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Supercomputer maker SGI has been going it alone in the upper echelons of the computing arena for decades and has brought much innovation to bear on some of the most intractable simulation, modeling, and analytics problems in the world. But the one thing it could never do was get enough feet on the street to sell its gear.
Now that Hewlett Packard Enterprise has acquired SGI, that will no longer be a problem, but the downside, as far as the variety in the IT ecosystem is concerned, is that yet another independent company will be subsumed into a much larger …
HPE Expands HPC Reach With SGI Buy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Not long ago, we took a look back at the last decade of Amazon Web Services and its growth, particularly in terms of its reach into high performance computing and large-scale enterprise workloads. While the startup story is easier to tell for AWS in terms of the capex/opex advantage to compete with far larger companies, the enterprise use case growth of AWS is still a stunning story over time.
This morning during his AWS Summit New York keynote, AWS Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels shared growth highlights of the company over the last ten years, noting that the message is …
AWS CTO on How Startups Define Large-Scale Competitiveness was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
It is going to take a lot of different things to build an exascale system. One of them is money, and the other is a lot of good – and perhaps unconventional – ideas. It may also take more cooperation between the hyperscale and HPC communities, who both stand to benefit from the innovation.
As a professor of computer architectures at the University of Manchester, the director of technology and systems at chip designer ARM, and the founder of a company called Kaleao to create microservers that implement many of his architectural ideas, John Goodacre has some strong opinions about …
Melding Hyperscale And HPC To Reach Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Following yesterday’s acquisition of deep learning chip startup Nervana Systems by Intel, we talked with the company’s CEO, Naveen Rao, about what plans are for both the forthcoming hardware and internally developed Neon software stack now that the technology is under a much broader umbrella.
Media outlets yesterday reported the acquisition was $350 million, but Rao tells The Next Platform it was not reported correctly and is actually more than that. He was not allowed to state the actual amount but said it was quite a bit higher than the figure given yesterday.
Nervana had been seeking a way to …
Nervana CEO on Intel Acquisition, Future Technology Outlook was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
How on earth could a company the size and scope of Delta—a company whose very business relies on its ability to process, store, and manage fast-changing data—fall prey to a systems-wide outage that brought its business to a grinding halt?
We can look to the official answer, which boils down to a cascading power outage and its far-reaching impacts. But the point here is not about this particular outage; it’s not about Delta either since other major airlines have suffered equally horrendous interruptions to their operations. The real question here is how companies whose mission-critical data can be frozen following …
Delta Datacenter Crash: Do the Math on Disaster Recovery ROI was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Making the transition from disk storage to flash and other non-volatile media is perhaps more difficult for the makers of storage than it is for customers.
All things being equal, storage suppliers would have preferred for disks to continue selling and flash to be incremental revenue, but IT shops have long been buying at least some of their disk spindles for performance, not for capacity, so it is not surprising that a chunk of storage in the datacenter has moved to flash and that more will migrate as flash gets denser and cheaper and the electronics and software to deal …
High Sticking With Flash Memory was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A first wave of benchmarks and real-world application runs on Intel’s Knights Landing has hit the shores and while not all the codes will be familiar or widely used, the takeaway of significant performance gains between the new generation and its Xeon Phi predecessor are clear.
As we described earlier this summer, the performance projections Intel released about Knights Landing were spot on and now that researchers are getting devices in their hands, these results will be put to further test. And as detailed previously, there are stark differences between Knights Corner and its bigger, badder successor, Knights Landing.
Take …
A Corner to Landing Leap: Xeon Phi Generations Put to Test was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Bringing a new chip to market is no simple or cheap task, but as a new wave of specialized processors for targeted workloads brings fresh startup tales to bear, we are reminded again how risky such a business can be.
Of course, with high risk comes potential for great reward, that is, if a company is producing a chip that far outpaces general purpose processors for workloads that are high enough in number to validate the cost of design and production. The stand-by figure there is usually stated at around $50 million, but that is assuming a chip requires validation, …
Deep Learning Chip Upstart Takes GPUs to Task was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Although the launch of Pascal stole headlines this year on the GPU computing front, the company’s Tesla K80 GPU, which was launched at the end of 2014, has been finding a home across a broader base of applications and forthcoming systems.
A quick look across the supercomputers on the Top 500 list shows that most sites are still using the Tesla K40 accelerator (launched in 2013) in their systems, with several still on the K20 (emerged in 2012). The Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (sports 2 K80s across 36 out of 1944 system nodes), an unnamed energy …
The Middle Ground for the Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Stacking up electronics equipment in precise form factors that slide into standard racks is not a new idea, and in fact it is one that predates the modern era of computing. As is the case with any standard, the constraints it imposes brings order to the market while at the same time restricting it, and making any substantial change in something as fundamental as the datacenter rack requires a pretty significant payback.
Any standard also requires volume manufacturing to really take off and yield benefits, and this has certainly not happened with rack-scale architectures to date. The time is perhaps …
One Rack To Stack Them All was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Bad things sometimes happen to good companies, but the great ones are resilient; they ride out the difficulties and keep forging ahead. So it will be with Cray, which does not just make massive-scale machines aimed at supercomputing centers but analytics engines that will see wider adoption among enterprises.
We have said it before and we will say it again: You have to take a long view of the high performance computing business – and we are using that term in the broadest sense – and not look at it on a quarter-by-quarter or even year-by-year basis. And so it …
Taking A Long View On HPC And Beyond was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Over the years there have been numerous efforts to use unconventional, low-power, graphics-heavy processors for traditional supercomputing applications—with varying degrees of success. While this takes some extra footwork on the code side and delivers less performance overall than standard servers, the power is far lower and the cost isn’t even in the same ballpark.
Glenn Volkema and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth are among some of the most recent researchers putting modern gaming graphics cards to the performance per watt and application benchmark test. In looking at various desktop gaming cards (Nvidia GeForce, AMD Fury X, among …
A Fresh Look at Gaming Devices for Supercomputing Applications was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The two-socket Xeon server has been the default workhorse machine in the datacenter for so long and to such a great extent that using anything else almost looks aberrant. But there are occasions where a fatter machine makes sense based on the applications under consideration and the specific economics of the hardware and software supporting those applications.
All things being equal, of course companies would want to buy the most powerful machines they can, and indeed, Intel has said time and time again that customers are continuing to buy up the Xeon stack within the Xeon D, Xeon E5, and …
Making The Case For Big Xeon Iron was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The concept of composable or disaggregated infrastructure is nothing new, but with approaching advances in technology on both the software and network sides (photonics in particular) an old idea might be infused with new life.
Several vendors have already taken a disaggregated architecture approach at the storage, network, and system level. Cisco Systems’ now defunct UCS M Series, for instance, is one example, and one can consider Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s The Machine as one contemporary example and its Project Synergy as two others; DriveScale, which we covered back in May, is possibly another. But thus far, none of …
The (Second) Coming of Composable Systems was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Call it a phase that companies will have to go through to get to the promised land of the public cloud. Call it a temporary inevitability, as Microsoft does. Call it stupid if you want to be ungenerous to IT shops used to controlling their own infrastructure. Call it what you will, but it sure does look like all of the big public clouds are going to have to figure out how to offer private cloud versions of their public cloud infrastructure, and Amazon Web Services be no exception if it hopes to capture dominant market share as it …
The Inevitability Of Private Public Clouds was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
With this summer’s announcement of China’s dramatic shattering of top supercomputing performance numbers using ten million relatively simple cores, there is a slight shift in how some are considering the future of the world’s fastest, largest systems.
While one approach, which will be seeing with the pre-exascale machines at the national labs in the United States, is to build complex systems based on sophisticated cores (with a focus on balance in terms of memory) the Chinese approach with the top Sunway TaihuLight machine, which is based on lighter weight, simple, and cheap components and using those in volume, has …
Changing the Exascale Efficiency Narrative at Memory Start Point was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Cannibalize your own products or someone else will do it for you, as the old adage goes.
And so it is that Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of infrastructure services available on the public cloud, has been methodically building up a set of data and processing services that will allow customers to run functions against streams or lakes of data without ever setting up a server as we know it.
Just saying the words makes us a little woozy, with systems being the very foundation of the computing platforms that everyone deploys today to do the data processing that …
First, Kill All The Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The battle between the Mesos and Kubernetes tools for managing applications on modern clusters continues to heat up, with the former reaching its milestone 1.0 with a “universal containerizer” feature that supports native Docker container formats and a shiny new API stack that is a lot more friendly and flexible than the manner in which APIs are implemented in systems management software these days.
Ultimately, something has to be in control of the clusters and divvy up scarce resources to hungry applications, and there has been an epic battle shaping up between Mesos, Kubernetes, and OpenStack.
Mesos is the …
Mesos Reaches Milestone, Adds Native Docker was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.