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 | Continue reading
The appliance model, where the hardware and software were tightly controlled by a single vendor, held sway in the datacenter for decades. But that | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
IBM, through the work of Edgar Codd, invented the ideas behind the relational database back in 1970. And even though IBM Research created the System R | Continue reading
The European Exascale Processor Memory Node Design (ExaNoDe) project has wrapped up, delivering a prototype multi-chip-module (MCM) that integrates Arm | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
Say what you will about the ruthless dominance of hyperscale companies, but they are managing to propel information technology at a rate, and in ways, | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
As readers of The Next Platform know, the edge – that area where the rapidly growing numbers of mobile, intelligent and connected devices live, running | Continue reading
Living in the future, as we do now, you no longer have to expend huge amounts of capital to build a petaflops-scale supercomputer. You can rent it on a | Continue reading
For more than two decades, DirectData Networks has focused on HPC storage, supplying large systems to enterprises and research institutions wrestling with | Continue reading
For more than a decade, the ease and elasticity of cloud storage has slowly been drawing enterprise users away from their beloved in-house datacenters. | Continue reading
Perhaps the biggest task that processor and system designers have to wrestle with these days is how to keep heavily cored and massively threaded | Continue reading
While there are plenty of distributed applications that are going to chew through the hundreds of gigabits per second of bandwidth per port that modern | Continue reading
It has been eight years since Arm announced its intentions to enter the server arena. But if you look at the processor landscape there today, you would | Continue reading
Big Blue has become a big believer in using differential signaling to attach everything – and we mean everything – to the processor. There is an upcoming | Continue reading
Bringing a new switch ASIC to market is no easy task, and it isn’t cheap, either. It is even harder to do without riding on the Moore’s Law curve down the | Continue reading
D-Wave Systems is getting ready to roll out its next quantum annealing computer, a system that will encompass more than 5,000 low-noise qubits, as well as | Continue reading
Public clouds bring a lot of advantages to enterprises, such as more flexibility and scalability for their many of their workloads, a way to avoid | Continue reading
The European Exascale System InterconNect and Storage (ExaNeSt) project has wrapped up, having completed development of its prototype system and run a | Continue reading
It has been two decades since Juniper Networks, then the big upstart rival to Cisco Systems and others as the dot-com boom was rising towards its | Continue reading
Arm Holdings has announced that the next revision of its ArmV8-A architecture will include support for bfloat16, a floating point format that is | Continue reading
We talked recently about the addition of new layers of performance in the storage stack and how users and storage architects are trying to make most | Continue reading
The dividing lines between system buses, system intraconnects, and system interconnects are getting more blurry all the time. And that is, oddly enough, | Continue reading
AMD is definitely on a roll in the United States for future exascale systems, having won deals at both Oak Ridge National laboratory and Lawrence | Continue reading
The apocryphal Chinese curse – “May you live in interesting times” – certainly applies to the datacenter of the early 21st century. Never before have the | Continue reading
The speed bumps with switch ASICs are coming fast and furious these days, and the datacenter is no longer dominated by the big switch incumbents such as | Continue reading
There has been a quiet revolution in storage happening and for once, it has not been led by the decades-old companies catering exclusively to on-prem | Continue reading
If you thought the gang at Intel were Moore’s Law biggest devotees, you probably haven’t heard Philip Wong expound on the subject. Wong, who is vice | Continue reading
Even before it launched a $1.3 billion acquisition of Cray back in May, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has had exascale aspirations. Its memory-centric | Continue reading
While the natural habitat of HPC storage is supercomputing and enterprise datacenters, the growing popularity of edge computing means sometimes that | Continue reading
The widening performance disparity between compute and I/O is not likely to get any better in the fast-approaching exascale era. In fact, even though | Continue reading
It would be convenient for everyone – chip makers and those who are running machine learning workloads – if training and inference could be done on the | Continue reading
High performance computing isn’t what it used to be. Performance, in particular, has become a slippery metric as a result of the design constraints of | Continue reading
The San Diego Supercomputing Center is overdue for a new supercomputer and thanks to a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, next year | Continue reading
More than a decade ago, VMware and its new server virtualization technology represented significant threat to traditional OEMs like Dell, IBM, and | Continue reading
Processor hardware for machine learning is in their early stages but it already taking different paths. And that mainly has to do with dichotomy between | Continue reading
Last fall, supercomputer maker Cray announced that it was getting back to making high performance cluster interconnects after a six year hiatus, but the | Continue reading
Startup Cerebras Systems has unveiled the world’s largest microprocessor, a waferscale chip custom-built for machine learning. The 1.2 trillion transistor | Continue reading
Carey Kloss has been intimately involved with the rise of AI hardware over the last several years, most notably with his work building the first Nervana | Continue reading
It has been a long time coming, and it might have been better if this had been done a decade ago. But with a big injection of open source spirit from its | Continue reading
The rapid changes underway in modern datacenters and HPC environment are demanding more compute power from a tech industry that is running into | Continue reading
If you want for the rapid pace of innovation in datacenter networking to continue, then you had better hope that the hyperscalers and major public cloud | Continue reading
Forget in-memory computing for the moment because it requires a complete re-architecting of applications and most of the time the underlying hardware, | Continue reading
In any chip design, the devil – and the angel – is always in the details. AMD has been burned by some architectural choices it has made with Opteron | Continue reading
As artificial neural networks for natural language processing (NLP) continue to improve, it is becoming easier and easier to chat with our computers. But | Continue reading