Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Sunday, July 5, 2026
HP Doubles Down On Infrastructure
Hewlett-Packard is "doubling down on infrastructure" as it splits itself in half, a process that should be completed by November 2015, CEO Meg Whitman told attendees of its Discover event in Barcelona, Spain. Whitman sought to portray a proud Silicon Valley company that "has turned the corner" since 2011, when it was awash in $12 ... Full article
HP’s Itanium Odyssey Ends With Superdome X Xeon Iron
Companies that have been looking for a capacious shared memory system from Hewlett-Packard and who have been waiting for years for the company to deliver a variant of its Superdome machines based on Intel's Xeon processors do not have to wait any longer. The day has come, and the "DragonHawk" Superdome X systems have landed ... Full article
Pentagon Readies New Cloud Plan
The Defense Department is preparing to issue a new strategy for procuring cloud services that reportedly downgrades the role of its current "cloud broker," giving more flexibility to individual military components. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has acted as the Defense Department's exclusive broker for procuring and implementing cloud services across one of the ... Full article
Dow Seeks Chemistry Between Clusters And Cloud
Like many organizations, Dow Chemical Company has to provide local compute and storage for running modeling and simulation applications at multiple facilities. But it wants to be able to run applications across those facilities in such a way that it can drive up the utilization across those clusters, and it is also exploring how it ... Full article
Honda Speeds Past On-Site Clusters for Critical R&D
When one thinks of Honda Motor Company, the first image that comes to mind are likely of the automobiles, which wouldn’t be unnatural given that the company is a top five auto manufacturer in the U.S. and at the top of the list elsewhere in Asia. However, Honda’s business goes far beyond just automobiles, with ... Full article
HP Servers, Storage Decline As Split Begins
Hewlett-Packard reported declining fiscal year and quarterly revenues as it implements a restructuring plan for breaking into an enterprise business and a PC and printer businesses. HP reported fourth quarter net revenues of $28.4 billion, down 2 percent from the same quarter last year. It also reported declining annual revenues of $111.5 billion, a 1 ... Full article
Steel Mill Transformed Into Juiced Datacenter
A former steel mill outside of Philadelphia that is connected to more than 2 gigawatts of electricity has been converted into a datacenter and is opening up its doors to accept servers, storage, and switches in early 2015. The mill is a former US Steel facility that was built in 1953 and that made steel ... Full article
Intel’s Super Elastic Datacenter Bubble
IT spending is growing at a few measly points a year, at best, and guess what? Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, is not even breaking a sweat. And the reason why is simple: revenues from the chippery that Intel sells in servers, storage, and switches has been growing much faster than ... Full article
Qualcomm To Storm The Datacenter With ARM Chips
The coming battle over compute in the datacenter pitting myriad ARM server chip makers against X86 processors is starting to shape up, with smartphone and tablet chip provider Qualcomm entering the ring after months of rumors. The chip company, which is one of the dominant suppliers of ARM chips in the world for client devices ... Full article
Unravelling Hadoop Performance Mysteries
Despite the fact that it runs on plain vanilla X86 servers and 64-bit operating systems, Hadoop is a complex beast that's prone to bottlenecks and performance issues. Getting Hadoop to run well isn't easy and typically requires a lot of tuning on the part of the customer or its system integrator. There's a good reason ... Full article
A Cure For Risky Storage Upgrades
The latest version of storage services specialist SolidFire's Element OS adds multi-tenant networking along with user features the company said can be used to consolidate a mix of application workloads in the datacenter. SolidFire said this week its Element OS 7 builds on the previous six versions to target consolidation, automation, and scaling of cloud ... Full article
Euroserver Project Targets Green Datacenters
A European "green computing" effort is taking a new approach to datacenter scaling while attempting to rein in IT equipment density and energy consumption. The Euroserver project that includes European electronics heavyweights such as ARM Ltd. and STMicroelectronics is pursuing a next-generation "micro-server" or "server on a chip." By shrinking the size of future server ... Full article
SUSE Rolls Up Cloud, Storage, And HANA for Startups
Enterprise Linux vendor SUSE announced a batch of initiatives this week at a company event, including a "bring your own subscription" option and a preview of new storage offering. SUSE also said it will back an initiative to help big data startups develop new applications based on the SAP HANA platform. The portable subscription option ... Full article
DataCore Storage Platform Scales To 64 PB
Software-defined storage specialist DataCore Software said the latest release of its storage services platform could double the scale of hyper-converged storage systems to 64 nodes while significantly bumping up the performance of write-heavy workloads. The company released a new version of its SANsymphony-V10 storage platform and a virtual storage area network that works with any ... Full article
Early NVLink Tests Show GPU Speed Burst
Crunching data is not as big of a problem as moving it around so it can be crunched. The PCI-Express bus that links CPU processors to peripheral accelerators has run out of gas, and that is why Nvidia has cooked up the NVLink point-to-point interconnect for its future Tesla GPU coprocessors. The NVLink technology is ... Full article
Facebook Gives Lessons In Network-Datacenter Design
Every now and again, the hyperscale datacenter operators tell the world about some new tricks they have come up with to solve a particular set of pesky problems, and then the IT industry takes notice and eventually, if the idea is a good one, it sticks. So it is with the new network design that ... Full article
Nvidia Doubles Up Tesla GPU Accelerators
Those who have an insatiable appetite for floating point performance – and who doesn’t, really? – prepare for a new crunchy course of Tesla iron from Nvidia. As the SC14 supercomputer conference is opening in New Orleans, and Nvidia and partner IBM have just captured a deal to build two massive hybrid CPU-GPU supercomputers mixing ... Full article
Enterprises Get On The Xeon Phi Roadmap
The Xeon family of processors have been around so long and are so vital to the fortunes of Intel that no one questions that there is a long-term roadmap for the devices. But thus far, Intel has only delivered one generation of Xeon Phi coprocessors, and the details have been scant on the second generation. ... Full article
Taking The Omni-Path To Cluster Scaling
Intel has some impressive networking assets that it has acquired in the past several years, and the company has made no secret that it wants its chips to be used in switches and network adapters and the silicon photonics networks that will eventually be used to lash machines to each other. The first fruition of ... Full article
A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS
The idea behind cloud computing, as pioneer Amazon Web Services believed when it launched its first utility compute and storage products eight years ago, is to abstract away the underlying hardware and provide raw resources to programmers for applications to run on. This hardware is a competitive advantage for AWS, as it has been for ... Full article