BLACK BOX PARADOX

This is a guest post from Mike Montemorra, who is a technology guru with long and successful career in computer industry. Mike keeps an eye on the latest developments in computer and storage technology and publishes his observations weekly. Below is his brief summary of what was important in the past week.

Backblaze discusses an effective to save time and effort by collaboratively developing using the cloud.  I think a lot of folks are doing this now, but some large companies are still clinging to older development models.  The future is cloudy and foggy!

… and to underscore the ongoing demand for cloud compute, check out AMD’s latest 7nm Epyc ‘Rome’ processors with Zen2 cores and TSMC as the foundry.  It looks like Amazon is an early adopter.    AMD also previewed their datacenter GPU roadmap in this article.

Continue reading →

This is a guest post from Mike Montemorra, who is a technology guru with long and successful career in computer industry. Mike keeps an eye on the latest developments in computer and storage technology and publishes his observations weekly. Below is his brief summary of what was important in the past week.

I may have published this previously, but the technology of monatomic PCM is interesting.  I hope it can be harnessed in a manufacturable and scalable approach which might allow for more tiers and more competition in the Storage Class Memory space.  

Source: IBM (from The Memory Guy)

We can expect more development in the area of software defined data centers that allow for fast and rapid adaptation to memory tiers of varying latency.  Combine this with varied workloads, especially for big cloud providers and you can see why rapid optimization is key.  Here is one view from Huawei: 

An amazing step forward in HPC with this upcoming Cray Shasta system.  AMD and Nvidia in one huge box! Their low latency (300ns) multinodal switch is perhaps the most amazing part of this system.

I wonder whether this approach might be adaptable to optical interconnects and optical communication schemes at very low system SNR.   Lau and Clerk found a way to improve the SNR of quantum sensors… for the nitty-gritty, read their full paper.

Continue reading →

This is a guest post from Mike Montemorra, who is a technology guru with long and successful career in computer industry. Mike keeps an eye on the latest developments in computer and storage technology and publishes his observations weekly. Below is his brief summary of what was important in the past week.

A good discussion on some of the big things going on in solid state storage by folks who know.  Enjoy!  For regular technology updates, go to Jim Handy’s website.   He also allows you to subscribe to his podcasts.