HPC

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Live in-depth interviews with tech makers and shakers in the heart of Silicon Valley? Why yes, it's The Next I/O Platform

Dive deep into networking and storage next week with our awesome sister site, The Next Platform

Event Join the editors of our sister site The Next Platform for The Next I/O Platform conference in San Jose on September 24.

This is an event underpinned by in-depth, live, on-stage interviews with those at the bleeding edge of storage and networks, on both the technology creation and end user sides. You can check out the full agenda and buy tickets here.

After stalling for the better part of a decade, data center networking is back on the Moore’s Law growth curve, supplying more bandwidth and more ports at lower costs. Ethernet still dominates except in niche cases where low latency is absolutely demanded, and there is no reason to believe this will ever change – not with Ethernet absorbing all the good ideas.

The hyperscalers have shaped Ethernet to their needs, distinct from mainstream Ethernet switching, as much as HPC shops adopted InfiniBand two decades ago and made it their own. Now enterprises can benefit from these advances by adopting the networking approaches employed by HPC and hyperscale data centers – and many are doing just that.

The interconnect landscape is more than Ethernet and niche technologies such as InfiniBand and Omni-Path. The PCI-Express bus within servers has become a fabric in its own right, and is being used as an interconnect between chiplets on a die and sockets in a system as well as a peripheral bus, as a switch infrastructure for compute accelerators and in-chassis and in-rack storage, and is being used as a transport layer for the NVM-Express flash protocol as well as for accelerator and storage protocols such as CCIX, Gen-Z, CXL, and OpenCAPI.

These, along with Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect for its Tesla GPU accelerators, are all going to be important architectural elements of future systems, which will by and large have hybrid compute, storage, and networking. Silicon photonics is also going to play a complementary role in providing a new transport for protocols to lash system components together within rack infrastructure.

This storage and networking confluence will be at the heart of The Next I/O Platform event in San Jose, California, USA, on September 24, 2019. Find out more right here.

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