From the moment the first rumors surfaced that AMD was thinking about acquiring FPGA maker Xilinx, we thought this deal was as much about software as it was about hardware. …
Now Comes The Hard Part, AMD: Software was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In March, Nvidia introduced its GH100, the first GPU based on the new “Hopper” architecture, which is aimed at both HPC and AI workloads, and importantly for the latter, supports an eight-bit FP8 floating point processing format. …
Chip Makers Press For Standardized FP8 Format For AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The people running Google Cloud can see the tides of HPC changing and know that, as we discussed only a few months ago, there is a fairly good chance that more HPC workloads will move to cloud builders over time as their sheer scale increasingly dictates future chip and system designs and the economics of processing. …
With Cloud HPC Toolkit, Google Pursues HPC, Intel Pushes OneAPI was written by Dylan Martin at The Next Platform.
When it comes to building any platform, the hardware is the easiest part and, for many of us, the fun part. …
Precision, Accuracy, Scale – And Experience – All Matter With AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
What is the most expensive component that hyperscalers and cloud builders put into their X86 servers? …
The Future Of System Memory Is Mostly CXL was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
After almost two years with data storage giant Western Digital, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla is getting used to the questions. …
Hard Drives Are The Mark Twain Of Technology was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Perhaps Janet Jackson should be the official spokesperson of the supercomputing industry. …
So, You Think You Can Design A 20 Exaflops Supercomputer? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Both Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, which also included parallel database system maker Tandem and minicomputer innovator Digital Equipment Corp when HP bought Compaq for $25 billion back in September 2001, had histories as platform providers but the combined companies were not able to create on the X86 platform the kinds of venerable platforms such as the HP 3000 and DEC VAX and AlphaServer minicomputers, the HP 9000 Unix systems, or the Tandem NonStop systems. …
GreenLake: Finally, A Platform That HPE Utterly Controls was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been an early and enthusiastic supporter of alternate processor architectures outside of the standard Xeon X86 CPUs that comprise the vast majority of its revenues and shipments, particularly with Arm server chips starting in 2011. …
HPE Is The First Big OEM To Adopt Ampere Computing Arm Chips was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Until exascale supercomputers get a lot cheaper, which will allow weather forecasting models to run at a much smaller resolution – and more frequently – to deliver hyper-local weather forecasts, the actual weather forecasting is still going to be done by people. …
NOAA Gets 3X More Oomph For Weather Forecasting; It Needs 3,300X was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Enterprises have been shifting many of their workloads into the cloud to take advantage of the scalability, efficiencies, and economics those environments offer. …
Project Arctic Means VMware Doesn’t Get Left Out In the Hybrid Cold was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It may have taken a while for the transition to 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec networking to take off in the datacenter, but this higher gear to switching is finally kicking in and delivering unprecedented bang for the buck in networks, and in fairly short order at least compared to sluggish pace that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet took getting into the datacenter. …
The Faster The Switch, The Cheaper Bit Flits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In the past several decades, data processing and storage systems could be architected from best of breed components, and the market could – and did – sustain multiple suppliers of competing technologies in each of the categories of compute, networking, and storage. …
AMD Needs To Complete The Datacenter Set With Switching was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The ink is barely dry on the PCI-Express 6.0 specification, which was released after years of development in January 2022, we hardly have PCI-Express 5.0 peripherals in the market, and the PCI-SIG organization that controls the PCI-Express standard for peripheral interconnects already has us all coveting the bandwidth that will come later in the decade with PCI-Express 7.0 interconnects. …
The Path Is Set For PCI-Express 7.0 In 2025 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In March 2020, when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the exascale “El Capitan” supercomputer contract had been awarded to system builder Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which was also kicking in its “Rosetta” Slingshot 11 interconnect and which was tapping future CPU and GPU compute engines from AMD, the HPC center was very clear that it would be using off-the-shelf, commodity parts from AMD, not custom compute engines. …
Lawrence Livermore’s “El Capitan” To Take AMD’s Instinct APU Mainstream was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Decades of cloud collaborations and optimizations have brought solid performance and cost efficiencies to cloud. …
For HPC Cloud, The Underlying Hardware Will Always Matter was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.
It is relatively easy to get a group of people that creates a new database management system or new data store. …
Bridging The Gap Between Open Source Database And Database Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A decade ago, Fangjin “FJ” Yang was a software architect at startup Metamarkets, a company that was building a user-facing analytics engine that a lot of developers simultaneously could go to, click on a UI, and very quickly get answers to their questions. …
Apache Druid Takes Its Place In The Pantheon Of Databases was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
We have been excited about the possibilities of adding tiers of memory to systems, particularly persistent memories that are less expensive than DRAM but offer similar-enough performance and functionality to be useful. …
Meta Platforms Hacks CXL Memory Tier Into Linux was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which is steering the development and funding for pre-exascale and exascale supercomputing in the European Union, has had a busy week. …
Atos Wins MareNostrum 5 Deal At Barcelona Supercomputing Center was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.