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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#211

Post by rdxm »

matude wrote: post #126
godelmachine wrote: post #95

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

> 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's easy to fake your way through "web scale" stuff. it's very much harder to deliver real HPC level computing...#justsayin'

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#212

Post by OldManAndTheCpp »

virtuallynathan wrote: post #179
shaklee3 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Mellanox has Ethernet switches with 300ns L3 latencies -- far lower than their broadcom counterparts. So it's not an Ethernet limitation, but a broadcom limitation.

With Mellanox ethernet switches, you lose some other features in exchange for lower latency. i.e. you can only break out 16 ports to 4x25G on a 100G switch (64 25G ports).

And you also get some benefits: enough internal bandwidth to allow every input port to cut through at line rate, and a single buffer to prevent starvation (the tomahawk chip has 4 groups of ports, each with a separate buffer).

Also, you can run cumulus on the switch, which is pretty awesome.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#213

Post by [deleted] »

corndoge wrote: post #94
simula67 wrote: post #85

With nVidia's poor kernel record, I hope this does not adversely affect switchdev [1]. Hopefully one day we can run the same OS on servers and switches [1] http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262...

switchdev is currently dormant. None of the silicon vendors seem to be willing to put the work in, so there's no adoption from the SDN/NOS space. We are still stuck with HALs. Also, there are multiple solutions to run Linux on switches, most notably Cumulus Linux and VyOS

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#214

Post by edoo »

olavgg wrote: post #206
edoo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I was looking you could get a 40GB card for around $300. Very impressive price that kind of speed in a home office.

On Ebay you can grab these cards for just $30. 100G is available for less than $200

Or at least knockoffs with potential back doors.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#215

Post by jabl »

wmf wrote: post #210
jabl wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other pieces -- not really sure what you're getting at. What I'm getting at is setting up clusters larger than what you can fit behind a single switch. So you'll want e.g. a CLOS fabric with multipathing (the typical IB setup, FWIW). As Trill and SPB seem pretty dead, it seems the momentum is to do the multipathing at the L3 level, using the aforementioned EPVN+VXLAN+BGP, or something similar.

You really don't need EVPN+VXLAN though. (And if you do need it I recommend finding a way to not need it.)

You mean you have separate subnets for each leaf switch, and then BGP or such for multipath routing between the leaf and spines? Sure, but what about subnet-level services like DHCP & PXE? Sounds cumbersome if you have to replicate that across all your leaf switches?

Or maybe you could do one "provisioning and admin" VLAN that spans the entire cluster and which uses spanning tree, and then the high-performance RDMA stuff uses the per-leaf VLAN's and L3 multipath routing? Is that simpler and better performing that EVPN + VXLAN?

What is the routing latency on such BGP setups BTW? I find it hard to image you can get even close to eth (not to mention IB!) L2 latencies? Or can the fast paths be done in hw (or FPGA's)?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#216

Post by adev_ »

aetimmes wrote: post #158
ktpsns wrote: post #58

Interesting. Since Mellanox is a big player in the HPC world, this means Nvidia wants to get more serious there. Due to Nvidia's bad Linux support and pricing (compared to AMD), I know quite a number of academic computing centers which like Mellanox hardware but avoid Nvidia hardware like the plague.

Modern HPC is being done with the Nvidia toolkits. Sure, the Nvidia driver is closed-source and a pain to work with for OS developers, but for the use-cases it's designed for (CUDA etc), it's far and away the best-in-class on Linux. To my knowledge, there are no systems in the TOP500 running AMD chips or GPUs. Intel has some competition in the CPU space (POWER series, some ARM, etc) but if GPUs are in those systems,…

> Sure, the Nvidia driver is closed-source and a pain to work with for OS developers, but for the use-cases it's designed for (CUDA etc), it's far and away the best-in-class on Linux.

It's unfortunately a sad truth.

CUDA won, And is now the de-factor standard for almost every application that run over GPU. Nvidia succeeded to jailed the entire HPC community to their bloated, badly maintained crappy software stack and this is very regrettable.

Any admin / integrator that had to deal with NVidia bloatwares under Linux hate it, and for very good reasons.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#217

Post by dotancohen »

eganist wrote: post #83
dotancohen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not 1%, but it really is not a significant portion. At least not in the circles where I am found: 1. I'm "a settler" in the West Bank. 2. I work in Israeli high-tech. 3. I work with mostly religious Jews. Note that the polls suffer from "survivor bias", the people answering the polls are those who feel that they need to should their opinion to the world. I don't answer polls, and with elections coming I get sev…

> 50% would refuse to work under Arab supervision? Again, this is ridiculous. I don't think money-sucking Jews would refuse to work under Hitler. Got curious and googled. Couldn't find that last statistic, but it seems 58% (give or take) of residents in the city of Ashkelon were in favor of terminating public works projects (specifically construction of bomb shelters at kindergartens) where Arab workers were employed…

I'm not sure which polls you are referring to, but I'l make you aware of a common tactic. You cannot believe polls in Israel, the questions and methods used are designed to return a specific conclusion.

Often polls will conflate the terms Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, Gazan, and a few other words. You will see that they will ask a question that is interpreted to the poll taker as "would you agree that Gazans who have bombed Ashkelon should be forbidden to work in Ashkelon" and then reported as "Ashkelon residents in favor of terminating construction of bomb shelters at kindergartens where Arab workers are employed".

The polls are _designed_ to present a specific picture, they are not designed to inform about the true nature of the situation. Just ask yourself, why are so many polls being taken, what is their purpose. You know as well as I do that there are no disinterested parties here, everybody has an agenda. At least I state my agenda and position clearly.

You'll also be surprised to know that I know not a single Israeli, not one, who has any qualm with the Iranian people. We're terrified of their nuclear program, but we remember the days of friendship between our countries and a significant portion of Israelis are of Iranian decent. Iran pretty much attacks us via proxy today (Hizboallah), but we see that as a manifest of their current religious regime and not as representative of the Persian people.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#218

Post by ksec »

Mellanox are also known for their excellent support on FreeBSD. And Nvidia is not known for anything related to "Open" or "Free".

I just hope Nvidia would not change much to the company. For example Netflix's Open Appliance, if I remember correctly were running on FreeBSD + Mellanox 100Gb NIC. All because of their top notch FreeBSD Drivers.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#219

Post by godelmachine »

praneshp wrote: post #123
godelmachine wrote: post #95

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

> how come mobile apps and websites get valued Can you name many apps and websites that closed (aka IPO or sold, not funding round) at 10+/20+ billion? Unless you're going to go for the stupid "uber is an android app my kid could could make for their senior project" shtick, I think most 10b+ apps are backed by _real_ technology

LinkedIn - $23Bn.
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