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Growing Hyperconverged Platforms Takes Patience, Time, And Money

In this day and age when the X86 server has pretty much taken over compute in the datacenter, enterprise customers still have their preferences and prejudices when it comes to the make and model of X86 machine that they deploy to run their applications. So a company that is trying to get its software into the datacenter, as server-storage hybrid Nutanix is, needs to befriend the big incumbent server makers and get its software onto their boxes.

This is not always an easy task, given that some of these companies have their own hyperconverged storage products or they have a

Growing Hyperconverged Platforms Takes Patience, Time, And Money was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Seven Years Later, SGI Finds a New Ending

Seven years ago, it was the end for SGI. The legendary company had gone bankrupt, its remains were up for liquidation, and its relatively few remaining loyal customers were left in limbo.

This week, SGI reached a new ending, significantly different from its last one, as HPE announced an intended deal to purchase the company for approximately $275 million.

SGI was reincarnated in 2009 when Rackable bought its assets, including its brand, off the scrap heap, for only $42.5 million (originally reported as $25 million at the time, but later updated). Rackable—that is to say, the new SGI—protected employees, key

Seven Years Later, SGI Finds a New Ending was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Intel Leverages Chip Might To Etch Photonics Future

Computing has gone through a few waves. There was human to human computing in the first few decades, and in recent years it has been dominated by human to machine computing with hyperscale consumer-facing applications, and we are on the cusp of a third wave of machine to machine computing that will swell compute, storage, and networking to untold zettabytes of traffic.

Under such data strain, there is an explosive need for bandwidth across datacenters as a whole, but particularly among hyperscalers with their hundreds of millions to billions of users. (Ironically, some datacenters are only now moving to 10

Intel Leverages Chip Might To Etch Photonics Future was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Cloud Startup that Just Keeps Kicking

Many startups have come and gone since the early days of cloud, but when it comes to those that started small and grown organically with the expansion of use cases, Cycle Computing still stands tall.

Tall being relative, of course. As with that initial slew of cloud startups, a lot of investment money has sloshed around as well. As Cycle Computing CEO, Jason Stowe, reminds The Next Platform, the small team started with an $8,000 credit card bill with sights on the burgeoning needs of scientific computing users in need of spare compute capacity and didn’t take funding until

The Cloud Startup that Just Keeps Kicking was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Intel SSF Optimizations Boost Machine Learning

Data scientists and deep and machine learning researchers rely on frameworks and libraries such as Torch, Caffe, TensorFlow, and Theano. Studies by Colfax Research and Kyoto University have found that existing open source packages such as Torch and Theano deliver significantly faster performance through the use of Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF) technologies like the Intel compiler and performance libraries for Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL), Intel MPI (Message Passing Interface), and Intel Threading Building Blocks (Intel TBB), and Intel Distribution for Python (Intel Python).

Andrey Vladimirov (Head of HPC Research, Colfax Research) noted

Intel SSF Optimizations Boost Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Getting Cloud Out Of A Fugue State

The polyphonic weavings of a fugue in baroque music is a beautiful thing and an apt metaphor for how we want orchestration on cloud infrastructure to behave in a harmonic fashion. Unfortunately, most cloudy infrastructure is in more of a fugue state, complete with multiple personalities and amnesia.

A startup founded by some architects and engineers from Amazon Web Services wants to get the metaphor, and therefore the tools, right and have just popped out of stealth mode with a company aptly called Fugue to do just that.

Programmers are in charge of some of the largest and most profitable

Getting Cloud Out Of A Fugue State was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Deep Learning Drives Nvidia’s Tesla Business To New Highs

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.

Intel’s VP of Datacenter Group on “AI—and More—on IA”

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.

HPE Expands HPC Reach With SGI Buy

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.

AWS CTO on How Startups Define Large-Scale Competitiveness

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.

Melding Hyperscale And HPC To Reach Exascale

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.

Nervana CEO on Intel Acquisition, Future Technology Outlook

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.

Delta Datacenter Crash: Do the Math on Disaster Recovery ROI

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.

High Sticking With Flash Memory

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 Corner to Landing Leap: Xeon Phi Generations Put to Test

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.

Deep Learning Chip Upstart Takes GPUs to Task

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.

The Middle Ground for the Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU

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.

One Rack To Stack Them All

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.

Taking A Long View On HPC And Beyond

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.

A Fresh Look at Gaming Devices for Supercomputing Applications

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.