Thursday, May 11, 2017

Data Center Links: May 11, 2017

Between company conference season and a lot of M&A activity recently, it is hard to keep up with the news.  Here are a few things I found interesting:


  • Facebook breaks ground on 1M sq ft Altoona data center.  Because Iowa is the best place for data centers.... Facebook broke ground on its fourth building in Altoona - a 1 million square foot data center. With this building the Facebook data center campus will total 2.5 million square feet.
  • Cisco acquires AI company MindMeld.  Just like many years ago when you had to keep a running list of who Cisco was buying, they are keeping a fast pace in 2017. Making it their third acquisition in two weeks Cisco dives deeper into AI by buying MindMeld, a San Francisco company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). The NLU functionality will be integrated with Cisco's Spark platform. MindMeld, besides being on my own 'cool tech' list, has been recognized as one of the top companies leading the AI revolution.
  • Cray launches Supercomputers built for AI.  Cray has launched new CS-Storm supercomputers that are purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads.  New CS-Storm 500GT and CS-Storm 500NX systems leverage NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, which foster "up to 187 TOPS (tera operations per second) per node, 2,618 TOPS per rack for machine learning application performance."   I'll take two.  :)
  • NVIDIA GPU conference.  AI, self-driving cars, healthcare, Volta GPU platform, deep learning software tools.....   Too many to mention; check it out here.
  • Microsoft debuts Cosmos DB. At the Microsoft Build 2017 developer conference Microsoft introduced Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database with five consistency choices. As a superset of DocumentDB Cosmos models include Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, Consistent Prefix, and Eventual. 

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