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TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Calyptia co-founder and CEO Eduardo Silva Pereira regarding how his company grew from the origins of the Fluent Bit open source effort favored by the largest cloud providers to deliver a full featured commercial solution for data observability.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Washington State University professor Pilar Fernandez about how her team’s battle for better information about the spread against Lyme disease and other zootonic pathogens and how technology is arming the public with better data to keep individuals safe with this growing epidemic. Dr. Fernandez and fellow scientists have tapped advanced analytics and AI to track tick populations and enable proper identification of tick species as part of a larger community effort to fight this growing disease.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with TechArena’s own technology strategist, Iddo Kadim, about the growing distribution of compute environments and infrastructure requirements to fuel continued innovation.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with VectorZero CTO and co-founder Sean Grimaldi about his extensive experience fighting bad actors to protect the nation’s security and how his learning at the CIA has informed his approach to elimination of attack vectors at VectorZero.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Beekeeper Founder Bob Rogers about how his team has broken through the challenge of training with confidential data and the broad applications this innovation enables.

Many of us love to watch sports on TV or streaming on a device of choice. Several of Allyson’s recent conversations on Edge lately mentioned CDNs as components of a transforming edge. But her recent conversation with @Carl Moberg of Avassa, made me think of the other edge in the broadcast chain. While we, in front of our devices and served by CDNs, represent the consumption edge, there is a production edge, which is also transforming at a digital pace.

In the previous 3 years I had the immense fortune to work as part of Intel’s Olympics sponsorship team on deploying innovative technology solutions on the greatest possible stage. One of our focus areas was on enabling transformation strategies of the broadcast infrastructure. Among other things we helped bring 5G based live sports camera coverage and virtualize live production infrastructure. You can read about some of that work here: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris discusses 5G, Virtualized OB Vans and other innovations.

In any major sports event, there is usually a host broadcaster. The host broadcaster produces the original content – live, replay clips, highlight clips, and archive, and feeds it to a network of rights holders to distribute to their respective audiences (us). Typically, there is a production studio in the event venue, often a broadcast truck. The various camera streams are aggregated to that studio for the live production. The produced content then gets distributed out often through a central broadcast center first, which is geographically close to the event venues and then from there to global audiences by satellite, telecommunication networks, internet, etc. And then eventually, it arrives at our devices, through the rights holders and CDNs.

The distribution side of this chain joined the internet age a long time ago. It leverages IP networking and much of it has been transforming, along with the rest of the networking world, to software applications running on standard ICT equipment. For example, transcoding functions that used to be implemented in fixed function appliances are largely done now in software running on standard servers, with or without dedicated accelerators. But the production side of this chain has been transforming in that direction just in the last few years.

Video processing in real time is not for the faint of heart. It involves very large amounts of data (streams of high-resolution video frames, precious pixels that must be used), subject to very stringent timing requirements. Manipulating several such streams simultaneously in real time as the producer switches camera views, graphics are overlayed, replay clips are inserted and so forth places very high demands on the underlying infrastructure. Indeed, even today most venue production setups involve tightly integrated bespoke fixed appliance devices.

Essentially, these are embedded systems, made up of embedded subsystems, that are specially put together for the event, or event type. Different sports (e.g., athletics is different from basketball is different from car racing) and different production standards (e.g., pro league vs. DIII college league) require their own specific configuration. If you peel back the sheet metal from many of these fixed function appliance subsystems, you’ll see that they are usually implemented these days as “standard” software bundled together with a “standard” server. But they are tightly integrated and sold and operated as black box appliances.

Historically, video infrastructure used bespoke network protocols and infrastructure. But in the last decade of so, this network infrastructure has been moving to IP with the advent of standard like SMPTE 2110. This enabled the IT network infrastructure makers like Arista, Cisco, Juniper, Mellanox (now Nvidia) and the likes to offer their very high-speed networking capabilities in this market. Now, with appliances that are really software running on servers and networks that are just like Cloud/IT networks (with a few added features) the sheet-metal can start falling away…

Okay, so where does this all lead?

For some cases it could mean that only cameras need to be in the venue anymore and everything else can be in a cloud. We all read about the boom of remote production when events resumed during the COVID pandemic, but on-site staffs needed to be minimized. Typically, these are cases where live broadcast requirements can be relaxed. Or where the complexity of production is low, so only a limited number of raw feeds are needed.

Many other cases require fully functional in-venue production capability. This could be to ensure that high quality production can take place even in cases of catastrophic network failure between the venue and the broadcast center (or cloud). It could also be because of the complexity of the production scene. E.g., the number of simultaneous cameras and feeds and the corresponding cost of network to transmit them all live to wherever the production takes place. Or it could be because of the amount of on-site usage of those feeds. E.g., for in-venue audience engagement, for replay and adjudication, or to enable rights holders with their own incremental production on-site.

And that’s where the different considerations of far edge (venue), broadcast center, and cloud come into play as described in Carl’s and Allyson’s conversation.

· The production setting in the venue – usually a truck or a basement room, is likely to be quite constrained in space, in energy and cooling capabilities, in the available HW infrastructure, etc.

· The cloud might be too “far” to move all production there, as mentioned above. Not to mention the networking costs to do so in large scale events.

· The broadcast center is in goldilocks mode. It can typically account for quite a bit of scale, but it can’t be an unlimited ocean of available infrastructure. The cost overhead to accomplish that would likely be prohibitive and hard to justify.

As this transformation is taking place, I expect it will require developing some new methods and heuristics about what fits where and how to decide it. Processes and applications may be repartitioned between edge, broadcast center, now that they are “liberated form the sheet metal”. Orchestration will gain a whole new meaning as well, as the same application would need to abide by completely different rules depending on where an instance of it is deployed and meet different infrastructure configurations in those different locations.

It will take time to mature into these new methods. But the outcomes are certain to be even more sports to watch in more exciting ways, and much improved operational models for content makers.

Ampere Computing gathered data center leaders in the bay this morning to throw a gauntlet at the future of cloud computing and its strategic role in our collective sustainable future. Ampere’s CEO Renee James introduced the discussion as an “old-fashioned industry convening” on the challenge of continuing to scale performance and capacity of compute capability within a finite power and sustainability footprint. James pointed out that the industry has relied on scaling power to address requirements for more performance with data centers contributing approximately 3% of global CO2 emissions. With energy costs and therefore cost per compute rising rapidly and becoming an increasing impedance to achieving scale, James’ goal with Ampere is to deliver compute performance below the efficiency frontier. She’s embracing the technology innovation that the semiconductor industry has been known for for decades in a different fundamental direction.

James was joined by an all-star cast led by Oracle Chair Larry Ellison who discussed how his OCI innovation is investing across Nvidia, AMD and Ampere to deliver compute performance to fuel AI era compute requirements. Oracle announced earlier in the day support of Ampere instances on OCI cloud for the Oracle database as well as delivery of support for on-prem deployments. This signals a huge win for Ampere and Arm architecture for a foundational enterprise workload. Ellison stated that they made this move because “x86 architecture is coming to the end of its life.” His vision focuses on new levels of balanced computing with emphasis on increasing performance of data movement to feed CPU and GPU resources and delivering this within constrained power limits. He went further stating that Ampere allows OCI to double compute within the same power envelope.

James was also joined by Neil MacDonald, EVP and GM of HPE Compute. HPE and Ampere shook up compute offerings earlier this year at OCP Summit Prague with a joint announcement of Ampere powered HPE platforms which you can learn about on this TechArena interview. Neil positioned this infrastructure today aimed for enterprises doing full stack cloud native workloads on prem and laid out the market opportunity targeting the >40% of servers which are more than 5 years old that consume 2/3 of the compute power in data centers today. This is an interesting value prop to contemplate. I don’t see the n set between antique server infrastructure and full stack cloud native design being remotely close to 100%, but there’s no argument that the enterprise is indeed embracing cloud native designs and maintaining some of these workloads within their own infrastructure. It’s not surprising that HPE is delighted to have an architectural choice to discuss in their offerings, and time will tell if this is an industry and investor message from HPE leaders or a bona fide market move from the company.

The folks at Ampere also made a terrific decision to include Andrew Isaacs, professor of climate change and tech, from UC Berkeley, in the discussion. Followers of the TechArena will know that we’re extremely bullish on tech and specifically data center compute’s strategic role in helping to address climate change as most recently discussed in our interview with Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe. Andrew’s view was similar to Jonathan and Ian’s – corporate action is necessary to change our climate trajectory, and computing’s imperative to change.

My thoughts on what was laid out today? I’m delighted to see Renee and her team focus the industry on the opportunity for efficiency vector innovation, and with friends like Oracle and HPE, Ampere will gain attention from both customers and competitors. It’s the kind of industry leadership I expect from a protégé of Andy Grove, and Renee didn’t disappoint today. We’ve already seen this leadership have impact with AMD’s recent introduction of high core count EPYC processors to thwart Ampere core leadership, and I expect Intel to follow suit in due time. I also expect other cloud providers who have already embraced Ampere instances to follow Oracle’s lead and grow offerings for Ampere powered cloud native offerings. I even can buy leading enterprises dipping into Ampere powered deployments.

Ultimately, I don’t know if I completely buy Ellison’s statement that x86 is at the end nor do I want to crown Arm the fait a’ complit champion for the future quite yet. I think the future is much more complex with CPU, GPU, other accelerators and open frameworks for chiplet designs defining the compute foundation that best serves customer requirements. What this move from Ampere represents is an accelerant of open market innovation where broad industry focus will improve both compute efficiency and choice of customer offerings. And with that, customers, and all of us, ultimately win. As always, thanks for reading - Allyson

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with CTO Advisor Keith Townsend about how enterprises should ready themselves for generative AI integration into their business opportunity.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with leading climate researchers Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe to discuss their new book and how they're delivering a mandate to leaders to take action now.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with cPacket Networks CTO Ron Nevo about how observability has evolved for a multi-cloud to edge era and why his company is delivering four key components of observability solutions to customers.

This is truly an amazing coincidence. My first blog on The Tech Arena is inspired by Allyson’s conversation with Lynn Comp.  

Lynn used to be my manager at Intel some years ago. I owe Lynn a debt of gratitude. When she moved on from that role, she gave me advice (and supported me with a reference) that set me on a path to the final 7 years of my time at Intel, which were by far the most gratifying of my professional career so far.  

We had many conversations on industry trends and strategy over the years. And so, hearing Lynn’s response to Allyson’s question on what’s different between the industry now and 10 years ago, I couldn’t resist the temptation to talk about “[Not] The End of History”. I hope you enjoy it, and please do let me know… 

The Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989. By the end of 1991 the Soviet Union had dissolved ending, a process started 3 years earlier. The cold war was over, and the US was the sole superpower left standing, thriving.  

In the summery of 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his famous article “The End of History?”, which he expanded into the book “The End of History and the Last Man” published in 1992. Paraphrasing, the thesis was that the winning political and economic system has been established and that the future of competition will be “higher in the stack”. Well… 

In March 2009 Intel launched its Nehalem based Xeon processor family. After fighting for several years to win back share from AMD, Nehalem was a winning product. And that’s an understatement. Among other things its timing and feature fit was perfect to win the virtualization hockey stick growth curve and ultimately established Intel’s Xeon CPU at the foundation of the cloud revolution. Within a couple of years, Intel had >95% market share in server CPUs. It seemed like “the end of history” for data center CPU wars and was all but clear who “the last man” was.  

The signs were already there (just like in geopolitics of 1989) and today we see a very different reality.  

• Intel’s execution faltered and AMD came back not just with competitive technology but also with credible and consistent execution.  
• ARM based CPUs have finally started making headway in the datacenter space. After acquiring Anapurna Labs in 2015, Amazon launched the ARM based Graviton CPU and instances in 2018, thus legitimizing ARM as a data center architecture. Ampere has been making real headway as an ARM based datacenter CPU vendor.  
• Nvidia established GPUs as an important architectural approach to accelerate various workloads and gained tremendous momentum, to say the least, with the AI boom. 
• Application specific accelerators have been deployed for anything from AI (for example Google’s TPU, but of course numerous companies are developing and selling AI training accelerators), to media transcode (YouTube’s Argos), to infrastructure (IPU/DPU galore, storage specific examples, etc…). 

History seemed to end again with the advent of cloud computing. “Everything” was going to “the cloud”, server and data center architecture became “the cloud”. And again, history starts again with edge, new optimization points, data affinity, etc…  

So what comes next? I’m eager to see (and discuss) how “the edge” is going to impact infrastructure, architectures, technologies and products. The Edge is about diversity as opposed to uniformity, and deals in general with priorities and constraints that are quite different from the cloud.  

How will the accelerator landscape evolve? I can imagine pooling use cases that make sense in some environments (perhaps cloud) but less so in others (e.g., edge). How will it resolve in the different environments between general purpose accelerators (e.g., GPU) and function specific ones? 

How will innovations like CXL impact these different market segments? How will modularity impact cloud, edge, and other evolving deployment models? How will application architecture eveolve? 

And how will evolving security and new workloads (I didn’t say AI much in this edition ??) impact all of the above? 

So much to think about, write about, talk about and to do! History keeps marching on after all. 

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with AMD's Lynn Comp about the changing landscape of CPU design and how AMD is poised to lead future innovation.

The TechArena presents Edge 2023, Seven Strategies for Maximizing Organizational Return based on interviews with Arm, Avassa, Canonical, Cellnex, Dell, Future of Privacy Forum, Intel, MIT, Nvidia, Radware, Ribbon, Scale Computing, and Varnish Software.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Ampere CPO Jeff Wittich and HPE VP Peter Groth about their recently announced collaboration for cloud infrastructure optimized for compute sustainability.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chat’s with OCP’s VP of Market Intelligence and Innovation, Cliff Grossner, about the challenges facing data center innovation and how OCP has transformed to drive deeper partnerships with the industry and broaden its impact on data center innovation.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Avassa CTO Carl Moberg about how his company is bringing application control to edge environments and how his team as designed solutions for both infrastructure operators and application developers.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with OCP Chair and CloudFlare VP Rebecca Weekly about the future of open computing solutions, how regional demands drive the OCP mission, and the importance of sustainability.

TechArena Host Allyson Klein chats with Open Compute Foundation leaders Michael Schill and Steve Helvie about the organization’s rising contributions and what it means for broad adoption of open hardware configurations from edge to cloud.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock live from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague on her organization’s mission to drive open software, hardware and data contributions for UK developers.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Varnish CMO Adrian Herrera about the demand for higher performance content delivery at the edge and how his company is investing in record breaking technology breakthroughs to fuel customer requirements.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Oracle VP Shasank Chavan about in-memory databases, customer demands in a data centric world, and how infrastructure must change to fuel customer needs.

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Scale Computing VP Craig Theriac about his company’s vision for simplified edge deployments for any environment and how Scale Computing solutions have evolved to meet evolving market demands.

We are entering a golden age of silicon innovation with disruptive innovation shaping how the foundations of computing will be designed, delivered, and deployed at scale. This is an area of the computing landscape that the TechArena has invested more than a fair share of time with expert discussions on CXL and UCIe, two industry standards that aim to change the face of data center infrastructure as we’ve known it for the past quarter century. This is why I was delighted to catch up with Letizia Giuliano, Alphawave Semi’s vice president of IP and product management, at the MemCon conference in Mountain View, California.

Alphawave Semi has emerged as a leader in high speed connectivity IP and silicon, and while they were focused on their HBM solutions at MemCon, their ambitions are much broader moving into IP blocks that can extend from data center SSD delivery to optics to future chiplet designs for UCIe powered compute. Letizia is a veteran of semiconductor design having worked on the complex and innovative Ponte Vecchio solution at Intel before joining Alphawave Semi, and our conversation was insightfully reflective of a new breed of semi innovator that is focusing on delivering core capabilities really well to fuel optimal package delivery.

Giuliano explained the company’s strategy is very much fueled by the AI era and the demand from customers to deliver more data to compute faster to speed time to insight from larger and larger data sets. HBM provides a perfect example of where Alphawave Semi’s expertise comes into play. “HBM is based on a 3D stack technology, so takes advantage of the new processes like TSB and 3D packaging and allows an SOC to have a wide part of the bus faster delivering higher bandwidth that differentiates it from other types of traditional DDR memory like DDR5 and DDR6.” This industry standard 3D stacked delivery of a wider memory bus provided by Alphawave Semi allows customers to take advantage of a lower latency and higher bandwidth memory source for data hungry application performance.

But that’s just the beginning. Alphawave Semi has set its sites squarely on the enormous opportunity that the UCIe standard has unleashed to the industry, for the first time creating a standard interconnect for chiplets on the same die. Giuliano’s excitement about what UCIe represents for her company was palpable in our discussion. “Someone said that the package is going to be the next motherboard and I really relate to that. Alphawave Semi can build a lot of pieces inside that package to make sure that we accelerate time to market for the solution.” This vision opens up incredible opportunity for disruptive platforms for customers like the large cloud service providers deeply involved in the UCIe standard, but it also changes the landscape of smaller semiconductor players with unique niches becoming increasingly relevant in delivery of IP to multi-vendor designs. This is what makes Alphawave Semi and others like them in the industry so interesting as we make this bold foray into the new chiplet era of compute delivery. To check out more about Alphawave Semi and get in touch with the team visit their website. As always, thanks for engaging - Allyson

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Alphawave Semi’s Letizia Guiliano about the future of semiconductor innovation across memory, optical and interoperable chiplet solutions and how her company is poised to deliver leadership innovation rooted in standards.

As we wrap the first quarter of 2023 we are facing an environment of soft demand for data center infrastructure and questions about DRAM innovation. Traditional DRAM technologies are pushing up against traditional cell shrink expectations with the demise of Moore’s Law and innovation cost recovery delayed from traditional one generation cadence. Price curves on DRAM have also taken a hit from soft demand looking like double diamond ski slopes for the last couple of quarters. In fact, as the industry discussed the state of memory yesterday in Mountain View, Micron announced the worst loss in the history of the company due to memory write offs but also signaled that the epic fall may be behind us providing a glimmer of hope for demand stabilization. With this subdued current state of affairs, I don’t think there’s a better time to look to the future where disruptive paths of innovation will help propel this entire sector forward and bring the data capacity and performance capability AI era applications demand.

In today’s MemCon Keynote, Microsoft’s Zaid Khan laid out the challenge clearly. AI workloads require massive memory footprints, and while HBM solutions hold promise for the performance AI requires, issues with error sustainability and capacity may limit its application. New alternatives are required. Zaid called for radical scaling solution alternatives to be created by the industry that address not only performance and speed/bandwidth requirements but also break through on geometry and TCO challenges facing today’s traditional innovation curve with new memory hierarchies.

All Industry Innovation Leads to CXL

While there was talk of new memory tiering with HBM and accelerated memory in the MemCon presentations, the behemoth in the room at the conference was CXL. The new industry standard available on both Intel and AMD platforms today and gaining traction with industry solution availability promises to introduce a new tier of memory for additional tiering of memory for applications not requiring the low latency of DDR5 or even HBM configurations. CXL will also open the door for disaggregated system design functioning as a switch connecting compute pools with coherent memory pools and enabling workload composability with resource precision we’ve not historically seen in data centers. The good news about CXL? The large cloud providers are squarely behind the technology serving on the board for the standards consortium and placing their weight behind integration of the standard into their infrastructure. This matters…a lot…when you consider the volume of infrastructure the large players represent to the market.

But questions still remain. Will CXL’s reliance on PCIe gen 5 and 6 provide the data rates required for tiered memory solutions, or will latency drawbacks gate use by many applications? What happens to the enterprise? Do they have sophisticated enough workload oversight for on-prem use of this new capability at scale, and will CXL’s introduction form an even greater wedge between cloud provider and enterprise data center environments? And can CPU vendors deliver on schedule to ensure the swift transition to the “now it really gets interesting” flavors of the specification, namely introduction of CXL 2.0 and 3.0 in servers? Intel and AMD are both on the record for integration of 2.0 in next generation servers, and the collective assembled in Mountain View certainly hope that they both deliver to promises as their delivery is required for broad market adoption. As always, thanks for reading - AK