After two and a half quarters of tightening the purse strings, the world’s largest consumers of infrastructure – the eight major hyperscalers and cloud builders – plus their peers in the adjacent communications service provider space all started spending money on servers and storage again, and Intel can breathe a sigh of relief as it works to get its 10 nanometer manufacturing on track for the delivery of “Ice Lake” Xeon SP processors sometime in the second half of next year. …
Hyperscalers And Cloud Builders Resume Their Spending Spree was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
True to its name, Google’s famous Borg cluster controller has absorbed a lot of different ideas about how to manage server clusters and the applications that run atop them at the search engine and now cloud computing giant. …
Ma Bell, Not Google, Creates The Real Open Source Borg was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If the only thing you really know to date about machine learning chip startup, Groq, is that it is led by one of the creators of Google’s TPU and that will target inference, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything. …
A Look Inside the Groq Approach to AI Inference was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Stanford University doesn’t own software defined networking. But it sure does feel that way some days. …
Who Is In Charge Of The Datacenter Network? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The image of Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang pacing across the stage at a tech conference and talking about his company’s latest new markets for artificial intelligence, the latest partnerships with high-profile vendors, and looking into the near horizon for Nvidia’s next revenue stream has become a familiar one. …
Nvidia Pushes AI Out To The Edge, Where 5G Is Waiting was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
In the past five years or so, we have had a remarkably good – and predictable – run of increases in aggregate switching bandwidth out of the major ASIC suppliers, and it has been a boon that underpins the massive expansion in datacenters among the hyperscalers. …
Cheering On The Optical I/O Inflection Point was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The first exaflops-capable supercomputers are just around the corner and to celebrate this milestone-to-be and talk about its ramifications, the US Department of Energy hosted a national “Exascale Day” discussion. …
Exascale Is Not Your Grandfather’s HPC was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
The appliance model, where the hardware and software were tightly controlled by a single vendor, held sway in the datacenter for decades. …
The Substrate To Bind Datacenter Switching And Routing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
HPC shops are used to doing math – it is what they do for a living, after all – and as they evaluate their hybrid computing and storage strategies, they will be doing a lot of math. …
Understanding And Balancing HPC On-Premises And In The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
AMD has picked up yet another big supercomputer win with the selection of its second-generation Epyc processors, aka Rome, as the compute engine for the ARCHER2 system to be installed at the University of Edinburgh next year. …
AMD CPUs Will Power UK’s Next-Generation ARCHER2 Supercomputer was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Red Hat is coming onto IBM’s books at just the right time, and to be honest, it might have been better for Big Blue if the deal to acquire the world’s largest supplier of support and packaging services for open source software had closed maybe one or two quarters ago. …
The Potential Of Red Hat Plus Power Is Larger Than Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
There is little doubt that solid state disks have become a disruptive force for datacenter storage and have bright future. …
Hard Disks Give New Technologies a Spin was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
The vast swathes of unstructured data that now reside in the cloud has changed the nature of information technology in many ways. …
The Unlikely Marriage of Databases and Object Storage was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
IBM, through the work of Edgar Codd, invented the ideas behind the relational database back in 1970. …
Is Amazon’s Database Strategy A Glimpse Into The Future? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The European Exascale Processor Memory Node Design (ExaNoDe) project has wrapped up, delivering a prototype multi-chip-module (MCM) that integrates Arm cores, FPGAs, and 3D active interposer/chiplet technology. …
Europeans Add 3D Integration To Exascale Technology Stack was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Moore’s Law might be slowing down CPU compute capacity increases in recent years, but the innovation has been coming at a steady drumbeat for the interconnects used inside servers and between nodes in distributed computing systems. …
PCI-Express Steps Up To The Bandwidth Challenge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hybrid cloud is gaining traction as organizations seek to realize the flexibility and scale of a joint public and on-premises model of IT provisioning while also changing the way their compute and storage infrastructure is funded, transferring costs from a capital expense (capex) to an operating expense (opex). …
Automation And Policy Drive Optimal Hybrid Cloud Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Back in 2016, we wrote a column about the rise of data-centric computing. …
Staying Afloat In The Coming Data Deluge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Most people in the IT community tend to their fields, making their living in their patches, but there are some who change the landscape, and still fewer who do it again and again. …
Point To Point In The Datacenter With Andy Bechtolsheim was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
After more than two decades with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Darren Cepulis came to Arm in 2013, becoming part of the small cadre of people working in the chip designer’s high-performance computing (HPC) business. …
Growing Up In An HPC World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.