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Today’s topics include Nvidia’s release of the Titan V GPU; why HBO chose Kubernetes to help stream “Game of Thrones”; Microsoft Windows gaining ground in the education market; and Cloudian’s launch of HyperFile, an object storage-based NAS.
Nvidia introduced last week at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Long Beach, Calif., what officials are calling the most powerful GPU for PCs.
The new Titan V, with 21.1 billion transistors and the ability to deliver 110 teraflops of performance, is aimed at scientists and researchers working on high-performance computing tasks such as simulations and artificial intelligence. The Titan V has nine times the horsepower of its predecessor and is based on the same Volta architecture that is driving Tesla V100 server GPU accelerators.
“Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high performance computing and AI,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who added that “with Titan V, [Nvidia is] putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world.”
At the KubeCon North America 2017 event on Dec. 7, engineers from HBO explained why they chose to use Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system developed by Google, to help stream the recent “Game of Thrones” season seven via the HBO Go streaming service. Season seven of the popular show premiered this past summer.
“We went from not running a single service inside of a container to hosting all of Games of Thrones season 7 with Kubernetes,” said Illya Chekrygin, senior staff engineer at HBO. The HBO Go streaming service is a mesh of different API services all written in node.js and the Go programming language.
“The challenge with streaming a highly anticipated weekly show is the demand spikes when a new show is released,” Chekrygin said. “We were under-utilizing 50 percent of our CPUs and yet we found that we were running out of all of our other resources.”
Over the past few years, schools and even some enterprises have been flocking to Chromebooks, thanks to their affordable pricing and access to G Suite, educational apps and approachable device management tools. However, Microsoft, which has been gaining share in the education market, unveiled low-priced Windows 10 PCs to be released in January from hardware partners HP, Acer and Lenovo at the Bett Show.
With starting prices under $200, the devices can be managed by the teacher-friendly Education edition of Intune, a cloud-based device and application management service.
Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Windows and Devices division, said, “In K-12 schools in the U.S. in the last year, Windows device share grew 4.3 percent on devices under $300 and 8.2 percent on devices over $300, as more and more schools are choosing Windows over competitive offerings.”
Cloudian launched on Dec. 7 Cloudian HyperFile, an integrated network-attached storage controller that moves data inside Server Message Block and Network File System file-access protocols to servers from on-premises Cloudian HyperStore object storage systems.
Cloudian HyperFile is the first object storage-based system to include all the features essential to enterprise NAS customers, thus opening the door for deployment in capacity-intensive applications that employ file data. Object storage is a storage architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures such as file systems and block storage, which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks.
When combined with the limitless scalability of Cloudian HyperStore enterprise storage, organizations can gain new on-premises options for managing the tsunami of unstructured data.