With over 200 million users streaming its video services, the backend CDN servers, storage, and networks at Netflix have to balance performance and | Continue reading
You would have to look far and wide to find a tougher business to be in than chip manufacturing. Which is why the many dozens of server makers who used to | Continue reading
If you don’t measure something, you can’t manage it. And if you don’t set ambitious goals, then you can’t attain them. This is why AMD in 2014 took on the | Continue reading
Starting way back in the late 1980s, when Sun Microsystems was on the rise in the datacenter and Hewlett Packard was its main rival in Unix-based systems, | Continue reading
There is a growing number of vendors big and small going hard to the hoop to make processors for artificial intelligence workloads. AI and machine | Continue reading
In the longest of runs, say within the next five to ten years, in the large datacenters of the world, the server chassis as we know it will no longer | Continue reading
There is nothing at all wrong with legacy application and system software as long as it can deliver scalability, reliability, and performance. Changing | Continue reading
The remote procedure call, or RPC, might be the single most important invention in the history of modern computing. The ability to reach out from a | Continue reading
While the minimalist server processor — and the microserver concept that was based upon it — did not take over the datacenters of the world, there are | Continue reading
Sponsored If you have a hundred or a thousand machines that you want to work in concert to run a simulation or a model or a machine learning training | Continue reading
One of the key strategic moves that AMD made when it architected its comeback in the datacenter was to beef up the compute, I/O, and memory on a single | Continue reading
These are still early days for quantum computing, far too soon to talk about domain-specific quantum systems. But if there are areas hungrier than ever | Continue reading
While we are big fans of distributed computing systems here at The Next Platform, we never forget our heritage in big iron. And we never forget the | Continue reading
If you are a designer of chips based on the most advanced processes available from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and your roadmap is based | Continue reading
Dave Brown remembers when Amazon executives would pop into their small office in Cape Town, populated by the entire EC2 team of fourteen, and tell them | Continue reading
It is not news that China wants a rich, native, diverse semiconductor ecosystem to feed its largest consumers of compute. From supercomputing systems to | Continue reading
Five years ago, Western Digital, known for its hard disk drive (HDD) storage technologies, doled out $19 billion in cash and stock for SanDisk and its | Continue reading
A number of chip companies — importantly Intel and IBM, but also the Arm collective and AMD — have come out recently with new CPU designs that feature | Continue reading
Perhaps the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. is over procuring and maintaining some of its on-prem supercomputers. Over the next decade, the NSA | Continue reading
One of the reasons why Intel spent $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA maker Altera six years ago was because it was convinced that its onload model — where big | Continue reading
Expect to hear increasing buzz around graph neural network use cases among hyperscalers in the coming year. Behind the scenes, these are already replacing | Continue reading
Everyone knows that machine learning inference is going to be a big deal for commercial applications in the years ahead, but no one is precisely sure how | Continue reading
What is that famous maxim in computer science about something that doubles on a regular cadence? Moore’s Law is one answer, but that’s a doubling (in this | Continue reading
When the top brass at Intel say that the “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SP CPUs and “Ponte Vecchio” Xe HPC GPUs that are coming out early next year represent the | Continue reading
It is hard to imagine how anyone could run Nvidia better than it is being run right now. Even if the $40 billion acquisition of Arm Holdings falls apart | Continue reading
Scanning through Power10’s detailed announcement material, I’ve seen a lot architecturally that intrigues an avid reader of The Next Platform like myself, | Continue reading
The term “mainstream” in the context of the largest systems on the planet still only means a select few. But it is quite possible that proofs of concept | Continue reading
Managing MySQL databases in the cloud is no easy chore, according to Steve Zivanic, vice president of database and autonomous services at Oracle. Using | Continue reading
Scientists have unlocked many atomic secrets through physics research that studies particle interactions such as quarks, gluons, protons, and neutrons | Continue reading
Cash used to be king, and now market capitalization is. That’s one of the reasons that the biggest players in the semiconductor arena are snapping up | Continue reading
Machine learning inference models have been running on X86 server processors from the very beginning of the latest – and by far the most successful – AI | Continue reading
SPONSORED Sometimes, bad things turn into excellent opportunities that can utterly transform markets. Many years hence, when someone writes the history of | Continue reading
Atom Computing adds itself to a growing list of quantum systems makers with pedigreed founders, funding announcements, and a market that even the big | Continue reading
There are multiple ways of building a quantum computer, from superconducting and photonics to topological and ion trap, many backed by such big names as | Continue reading
Sponsored Robert Anderson’s tongue is only partly in his cheek when he says, “The greatest thing ever for the HDD industry was the smartphone.” Extending | Continue reading
There are some features in any architecture that are essential, foundational, and non-negotiable. Right up to the moment that some clever architect shows | Continue reading
Argonne National Laboratory has become a must-watch lab for those following the convergence of supercomputing and AI/ML. The lab has a number of systems | Continue reading
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. If someone has been named president of International Business Machines Corporation, it means they are the | Continue reading
Like its U.S. counterpart, Google, Baidu has made significant investments to build robust, large-scale systems to support global advertising programs. As | Continue reading
Not so very long ago, distributed computing meant clustering together a bunch of cheap X86 servers and equipping them with some form of middleware that | Continue reading
Current custom AI hardware devices are built around super-efficient, high performance matrix multiplication. This category of accelerators includes the | Continue reading
While a lot of software for creating and managing scale comes out of supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and the largest public cloud builders, there is | Continue reading
We said this a long time ago, and we are going to say it again now. One big reason that Intel paid $16.7 billion to buy FPGA maker Altera was that it was | Continue reading
The tight linkage between chip designs and chip manufacturing processes has caused its shared of havoc in the IT sector, and it is getting worse as | Continue reading
Data movement is the king of all challenges for supercomputing sites to hyperscale datacenters. Maneuvering around these bottlenecks while ensuring | Continue reading
What is a legacy data management and data analytics platform with 1,800 large enterprise customers worth? That’s a tough question to answer, obviously, | Continue reading
And you thought toilet paper shortages were bad in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, or board and plywood prices are high and getting insane at | Continue reading
Oak Ridge National Lab’s forthcoming “Frontier” supercomputer will be blazing a multitude of new trails when it goes live in 2022. While it is easy to | Continue reading