Today Microsoft announced it has acquired Cycle Computing, a software company focused on making cloud computing resources more readily available for HPC workloads. “Now supporting InfiniBand and accelerated GPU computing, Microsoft Azure looks to be a perfect home for Cycle Computing, which started its journey with software for aggregating compute resources at AWS. The company later added similar capabilities for Azure and Google Cloud.”
Radio Free HPC Looks at Biohacking
August 14, 2017 by 1 Comment
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks alarming new hacks of health care data. With news that Biohackers have successfully inserted malware into DNA, security is becoming a matter of concern for everything from scanners to gene sequencers. After that, we do our Catch of the Week.
Mellanox BlueField Accelerates NVMe over Fabrics
August 11, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Today Mellanox announced the availability of storage reference platforms based on its revolutionary BlueField System-on-Chip (SoC), combining a programmable multicore CPU, networking, storage, security, and virtualization acceleration engines into a single, highly integrated device. “BlueField is the most highly integrated NVMe over Fabrics solution,” said Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox. “By tightly integrating high-speed networking, programmable ARM cores, PCIe switching, cache, memory management, and smart offload technology all in one chip; the result is improved performance, power consumption, and affordability for flash storage arrays. BlueField is a key part of our Ethernet Storage Fabric solution, which is the most efficient way to network and share high-performance storage.”
One Stop Systems Rolls Out 4U Value Expansion System
August 10, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“The Value Expansion System is ideal for customers on a tight budget who need high-density PCIe expansion. Customers can utilize the 4UV for GPUs, flash or a combination of both, providing performance gains in many applications like deep learning, oil and gas exploration, financial calculations, and video rendering.”
Intel’s New “Ruler” SSD Form Factor – Up to 1 Petabyte in 1U
August 10, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Today Intel announced its latest memory technologies to advance datacenter storage. “These new “ruler” form factor SSDs and dual port SSDs are the latest in a long line of innovations we’ve brought to market to make storing and accessing data easier and faster, while delivering more value to customers,” said Bill Leszinske, Intel vice president, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), and director, strategic planning, marketing and business development. “Data drives everything we do – from financial decisions to virtual reality gaming, and from autonomous driving to machine learning – and Intel storage innovations like these ensure incredibly quick, reliable access to that data.”
Micron Unveils Flagship NVMe SSD Family
August 9, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“The Micron 9200 Series of NVMe SSDs are specially designed to deliver the blazing fast speeds, low-latency, and high-capacity needed to handle massive files, images and multimedia assets created by today’s complex application workloads,” said Eric Endebrock, vice president SSD and Systems, Storage Business Unit, Micron Technology, Inc. “With the Micron 9200 SSDs added to our SSD playbook, we are providing customers a rich portfolio of storage solutions to manage their changing business needs.”
Wow! Nimbus Data Unveils 50 Terabyte ExaDrive SSDs
August 9, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“With an interface and form factor identical to HDDs, but with vastly more capacity, ExaDrive will accelerate flash adoption in the data center. Viking Technology and SMART Modular Technologies recently began shipping 50 TB and 25 TB ExaDrive-powered SSDs for cloud infrastructure, technical computing, and digital content storage.”
Gen-Z Multi-Vendor Technology Demo Speeds Memory-Centric Computing
August 9, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Today the Gen-Z Consortium announced the world’s first Gen-Z multi-vendor technology demonstration, connecting compute, memory, and I/O devices at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. “The demonstration utilizes FPGA-based Gen-Z adapters connecting compute nodes to memory pools through a Gen-Z switch, creating a fabric connecting multiple server vendors and a variety of memory vendors. The multi-vendor participation reflects strong industry support for Gen-Z and showcases how future data centers can leverage this technology to attain a unified, high-performance and scalable fabric/interconnect. Additionally, a separate demonstration will show the scalable prototype connector defined by the Gen-Z Consortium, running at 112 giga-transfers/sec.”
Rescale to Enable Fast and Secure Data Transfer to the Cloud with Equinix
August 9, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“Although many enterprises have already made the move to cloud for certain data services, many are reluctant to make the move for one of their largest investments: on-premise, high-performance computing,” said Tyler Smith, Head of Partnerships at Rescale. “Rescale helps ease the migration process with a hybrid and burst solution, making best use of existing and cloud resources in tandem, and the partnership with Equinix adds a compelling layer of ultra high-speed data transfer and best-in-class security, while allowing the enterprise to keep their preferred private/public cloud model.”
IBM Scales TensorFlow and Caffe to 256 GPUs
August 8, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Over at IBM, Sumit Gupta writes that the company has enabled record-breaking image recognition capabilities that make Deep Learning much more practical at scale. “The bottom line is that the record IBM broke slashes Deep Learning training time from days to hours, which will enable customers to more easily address larger technical challenges significantly faster.”
