161–170 of 229 posts
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By Voltaire, the infiniband company acquired by mellanox :) Their ethernet accelerator VMA stands for "Voltaire Messaging Accelerator".
IIRC Mellanox was always doing Infiniband; they made the hardware and Voltaire wrote the drivers (before people understood open source and created OFED).
At NetApp we were an early customer of Mellanox (I told the founder that their name sounded like a poison gas :-)) which Steve Kleiman claimed implemnted Infiniband in anger. It was a good technology for the clustering team. Later as they grew and diversified into ethernet switches we bought a couple of their big core switches at Blekko. And at the current company we use their 40g network adapters to connect to high speed SDR hardware.
So now they are going to be part of Nvidia.
I get that this helps Nvidia in being more data center centric, but does it help them build better machine learning architectures? It does seem to be the only system that benefits from custom hardware more than the cost of that hardware. It seems that loosely coupled shared nothing clusters are not good machine learning back ends.
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I hope that it is more than an aqui-hire. Mellanox has driven IB speeds for more than a decade, limited only by PCIe bandwidth. Since they've had NICs that do both IB and Ethernet, they've been driving the ethernet market as well. We've been using their 100G adapters since 2015 (when they were first to market by a big margin). Even today, there are only a handful of vendors that can deliver a 100g NIC. I worry that i…
Infiniband hasn't increased in speed in a while, while Ethernet has. IB is all but done since Ethernet 200 and 400Gbps will be out soon, and in fact, are already supported by Mellanox switches.
IB still has lower latency than Ethernet at least on paper especially when it comes to RDMA but I don't know how much of an issue that is for these applications.
But overall I'm not sure how much it matters to Mellanox since they are also the ones who are making the high speed Ethernet switches and host adapters.
So, intel took over qlogic, now fabless(!) nvidia takes over mellanox /o\. Is there some real "normal" manufacturer of fast cards like IB, 40+geth left? By normal I mean manufacturer without management doing stunt tricks and pissing off own customers (like intel and nvidia does). Please please, tell me this isn't HBA appocalypse :D (i do own 2 IB cards from "intel", guess what - it's almost completely unsupported so…
I did not see that coming. At NetApp we were an early customer of Mellanox (I told the founder that their name sounded like a poison gas :-)) which Steve Kleiman claimed implemnted Infiniband in anger. It was a good technology for the clustering team. Later as they grew and diversified into ethernet switches we bought a couple of their big core switches at Blekko. And at the current company we use their 40g network a…
If they want to continue building large GPU accelerated workloads, pairing more tightly with networking seems like an obvious move.
I had great respect for Mellanox when I came to know that they invented InfiniBand. Again, I am suprisied it’s valued at only $6.9Bn. Pardon my ignorance, but how come mobile apps and websites get valued for 10+ or 20+ Bn dollars , while someone who creates real technology is valued at only $6.9Bn
A lot of IB technology is based on precursors like Myrinet, Quadrics, etc. Those companies were driven from the HPC market and the top500 by Mellanox in the last 15 years. It is arguable that IB won simply because it had better marketing, and a lot more venture capitol behind it. At one point, 6 of the top 10 supercomputers in the top 500 were interconnected with Quadrics, and over 1/3 with Myrinet. However, both Qua…
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Maybe just maybe this is not the fault of Nvidia but due to the fact that large parts of the Linux ecosystem are fragile, time consuming to configure and break if you look at them in the wrong way. Professional linux distributions like Ubuntu paper over a lot of that fragility, whereas in Arch Linux you can easily burn days getting basic functionality to work (multiple sound cards come to mind) only for it to break w…
> Maybe just maybe this is not the fault of Nvidia but due to the fact that large parts of the Linux ecosystem are fragile, time consuming to configure and break if you look at them in the wrong way. How it works with open source drivers is that you main-line your drivers so that the kernel maintainer maintain the drivers for you, for free. Choosing to keep your drivers closed source means committing to keeping your…
Not sure what do you mean by "maintain for free". Full coverage testing is not free.
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How about the the elections, local and state, and how the politicians talk to get support. People are honest when they vote. Maybe moderate people support bigoted politicians for some reason and politicians think that bigotry gets votes, I don't know. But it surely don't look good.
Moderate people did support extreme politicians. They accomplished the task by using good old fear tactics (which are especially effective, when actual rockets are flying at major cities and people get stabbed in the streets by people pronounching their will to destroy Israel) Now, we also have a very fragmented parlament which allowed some small parties (the ultra orthodocs) to be a linchpin for coalition building.…
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I agree with your sentiment, but the number is way below 99%. You can't blissfully ignore that a substantial number of people on both sides really hate each other. You can't say your PM is a jerk, but not the people because the people voted for him (or at least his party).
Seriously? Would you say the American people are "jerks" because Trump was voted into power? That's not how any of this works.
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> Pardon my ignorance, but how come mobile apps and websites get valued for 10+ or 20+ Bn dollars , while someone who creates real technology is valued at only $6.9Bn Imagine a building, say a shopping center, airport, or a city main square, that gets the same amount of visitors per day as some of those apps, and it might start to make more sense. Take Clash of Clans for example, valued at $10 billion. It has around…
It is worth adding that the margin out of an app tends to be A LOT higher than shopping centers, airport, etc while the initial capital tends to be a fraction of it. There are also different ways in which you can use the data to help you create another app with high daily active players. An app can have the whole world as their oyster, unlike shopping centers, etc.
To the point of this article, it's kind of surprising to me at least that licensing companies like ARM and Qualcomm have been so much more successful than Mellanox.