Best of breed and vertical integration are two opposing forces that have been part of the datacenter since mainframes first fired up six decades ago in a room with a glass windows in it so companies could show off their technical prowess and financial might. …
Vertical Integration Is Eating The Datacenter, Part One was written by Paul Teich at The Next Platform.
Things get a little wonky at exascale and hyperscale. Things that don’t matter quite as much at enterprise scale, such as the cost or the performance per watt or the performance per dollar per watt for a system or a cluster, end up dominating the buying decisions. …
The Supercomputing Efficiency Curve Bends In The Right Direction was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
At every key leap in processing capacity in high performance computing – and just rattling off more than two decades from teraflops through petaflops, and now on the verge of exaflops in two years or so – there has been this tension between custom-built systems that break through performance barriers and more general purpose machines based on more off of the shelf components that cost less and tend to be fast followers. …
Doing The Math On Fractal HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
We have been waiting for a long, long time for the ionic bond between compute and main memory to be softened to something a little more covalent and therefore allow for more complex storage structures to be formed within systems and across them. …
Gen-Z Memory Servers Loom On The Horizon was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If we could sum up the near-term future of high performance computing in a single phrase, it would be more of the same and then some. …
HPC In 2020: AI Is No Longer An Experiment was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
One of the benefits of the public cloud is that it allows HPC centers to experiment and push the limits of scalability in a way they could never do if they had to requisition, budget, and install machinery on premises. …
Urgent HPC Can Burst Affordably To The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Toward the end of 2019, a flurry of announcements by some of the most prominent IT companies suggests that collaborations will become increasingly important in the quantum computing space as the players jockey for position in the nascent market. …
Quantum Computing Providers Pick Their Dance Partners was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
A system is more than its central processor, and perhaps at no time in history has this ever been true than right now. …
Intel Declares A Truce Before Bus Wars Flare Up was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
When many think of the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected vehicles from a compute perspective, the first thing that springs to mind is likely the small processors that are hard at work sensing, analyzing, and feeding data to remote systems. …
How HPC, AI, and IoT Drive the Future of Smarter Vehicles was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
There are at least two – and possibly more – paths to make Arm processors competitive with the Intel and now AMD X86 incumbent processors in the datacenter. …
The Other Way To Bring Arm CPUs To Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The European Commission has anted up €3.9 million to create a set of tools and runtime frameworks that will be used to support the exascale supercomputers to be deployed across the continent in the coming decade. …
A European Dialect For Exascale Programming was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Like their US-based counterparts, Google and Amazon, the Chinese Internet giants Baidu and Alibaba rely on GPU acceleration to drive critical parts of their AI-based services. …
AI Recommendation Systems Get A GPU Makeover was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
With the dividing line between switching and routing blurring among the hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is no wonder to us that switching is growing as Ethernet switch ASICs get more and more routing functions and true Ethernet routing has remained more or less flat in the past five years. …
Routing Boosts Switching As The Lines Between Them Blur was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel has made another big move toward its ambition to dominate the artificial intelligence space in the datacenter, acquiring Israeli AI chipmaker Habana Labs for $2 billion. …
Intel Hedges Its AI Bets With Habana Labs Buy was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Competition in and of itself does not directly drive innovation – customer needs that might be met by some other product is really what makes suppliers hop to and get the lead out. …
Amping Up The Arm Server Roadmap was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hyperion Research has declared 2019 as the year that high performance computing in the cloud hit a “tipping point.” Cloud spending for HPC work is projected to jump from just under $2.5 billion in 2018 to approximately $4 billion by the end of 2019. …
HPC In The Cloud Rolls Through An Inflection Point was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
If hyperscalers, cloud builders, HPC centers, enterprises, and both OEMs and ODMs like one thing, it is a steady drumbeat of technology enhancements to drive their datacenters forward. …
Broadcom Launches Another Tomahawk Into The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
High performance computing has yet to fully embrace the cloud, but the benefits of the pay-as-you-go model is drawing in more HPC users with each passing year. …
Cloud-Based Engineering is Poised for Takeoff was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
For those involved with large-scale system planning, design, and procurement for campus-wide supercomputers, the target is balance. …
Operating A Campus-Wide HPC Center Like An Enterprise was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
As is the case with any new technology, there is a lot of hype and misunderstanding that comes along with something that actually improves some aspect of the system. …
Mythbusting Containers, The Los Alamos Way was written by Dan Olds at The Next Platform.