Author Archives: John Russell

John Russell

The Deep500 – Tackling a Deep Learning Benchmark

January 8th, 2019 (0)

How do you know if an HPC system, particularly a larger-scale system, is well-suited for deep learning workloads? Today, that’s not an easy question to answer because there's no widely agreed-upon benchmark or reference architecture for comparing DL performance ...

Is Amazon’s Plunge into Server Chips a Watershed Moment?

December 12th, 2018 (0)

For several years now the big cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, et al – have been transforming from technology consumers into technology creators in hardware and software. The most recent example being Amazon’s announcement two weeks ago ...

Cold Blanket Cast on Quantum Computing

November 30th, 2018 (0)

Amid the gush of money and enthusiastic predictions being thrown at quantum computing comes a proposed cold shower in the form of an essay by physicist Mikhail Dyakonov published in IEEE Spectrum this month – "The Case Against Quantum ...

Move Over Lustre & Spectrum Scale – Here Comes BeeGFS?

November 29th, 2018 (0)

Is BeeGFS – the parallel file system with European roots – on a path to compete with Lustre and Spectrum Scale worldwide? Frank Herold’s unsurprising answer is yes. Herold is CEO of ThinkParQ, the company created in 2014 to ...

Dell EMC’s HPC Chief on AI and Emerging Processor Diversity

November 19th, 2018 (0)

Last January, Thierry Pellegrino, a long-time Dell/Dell EMC veteran, became VP of HPC. His tenure comes at a time when the very definition of HPC is blurring with AI writ large (data analytics, machine learning, deep learning) clamoring for ...

Rise of the Machines – Clarion Call on AI Policy from House Subcommittee

October 2nd, 2018 (0)

Last week, the top U.S. Congressional subcommittee on IT weighed in on AI with a new report - Rise of the Machines: Artificial Intelligence and its Growing Impact on U.S. Policy. It's a 15-page fast read, focused on policy, ...

Azure Expands CycleCloud Access, Now Supports Nvidia Containers

August 30th, 2018 (0)

Microsoft Azure continued to beef up support for HPC and advanced scale workloads today announcing general availability of CycleCloud – its HPC cloud orchestration product based on technology from Cycle Computing which was acquired last August – and introducing ...

HPC Cloud Provider Nimbix Launches IBM Power9 Targeting AI

March 23rd, 2018 (0)

HPC cloud specialist Nimbix this week announced the addition of IBM’s Power9 technology to the Nimbix cloud starting with an early access “gated program” available now to be followed by broader access in the spring. Timing of the announcement ...

Hyperion on the Emergence of the Quantum Computing Ecosystem

March 15th, 2018 (0)

Quantum computing – exciting and off-putting all at once – is a kaleidoscope of technology and market questions whose shapes and positions are far from settled. Hyperion Research (formerly IDC’s HPC group) is now ramping up efforts to aggressively ...

Dell EMC Debuts PowerEdge Servers with AMD EPYC Chips

February 6th, 2018 (0)

AMD notched another EPYC processor win today with Dell EMC’s introduction of three PowerEdge servers (R6415, R7415, and R7425) based on the EPYC 7000-series processor. AMD’s new chip line has been steadily gaining traction among systems builders and cloud ...