Posts tagged with Jonathan Heiliger

In my mind a good conference is one that generates controversy – with my roots firmly in the 60’s I’d take revolution over evolution any day. The GigaOM Network’s Structure09 “Putting Cloud Computing to Work” delivered in my book as a thought-provoking conference. 

AMD, in collaboration with HP, were Primetime Sponsors of Structure09, which drew the “who’s who” of cloud computing – hardware, software, providers, consulting, press and users. One of the featured sessions was a Fireside Chat featuring Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, and Om Malik, founder of the GigaOM Network.

In this session Jonathan expressed his disappointment with AMD, Intel, and system OEMs. Specifically for AMD and Intel, Jonathan lamented that he was not getting the advertised performance from our latest processor technology. On the system provider front, Jonathan’s unhappiness was focused on the power consumption of the system.

As a representative of one of the companies called out by Jonathan – and sitting in the audience and hearing his talk first hand – it was hard not to squirm in my seat. We are supposed to be customer centric – we are supposed to be solving Jonathan’s problems so he can successfully grow his business.

So what is the take away from Jonathan’s talk?  Two points: benchmarks don’t necessarily measure real world performance, and the harsh reality of living on the “bleeding edge.” 

Benchmarks

The first point – benchmarks – is a topic that we at AMD are talking about a lot. Be it server VMmark scores or laptop battery life measurements  – we want performance measurements more relevant to real-world situations. Jonathan’s comments validate this approach – he has a very specialized software stack that he believes is not showing the performance of the industry standard server benchmarks that AMD and Intel quote. 

Life on the Bleeding Edge

The second point is life on the bleeding edge – Jonathan’s words suggest he is trying to drive his production environment to new levels of scalability.  When you hear Jonathan’s pain you realize why the research community and supercomputing world are often the leaders in implementing new innovations – they have the luxury of doing this type of revolution in non-production environments.

Perhaps Facebook has found the perfect storm. Getting the most value out of the fastest processors in the world is hinged on hardware and software working in lock step, and innovating together. This is an issue we deal with every day in developing and optimizing our multi-core technology. But, as an industry, we still need to get better.

So, how are we addressing this issue? At AMD we are focusing our efforts on designing and delivering balanced server platforms in terms of performance, price, and power consumption. The market trends of virtualization and cloud computing confirm this approach – these are not “high performance computing” workloads where raw processor power is demanded. Rather, these hard working environments need to keep utilization rates high and user response time low – all while drawing as little power as possible.

In terms of driving software to deliver better multi-threaded code, AMD is investing resources to design better optimized compilers and working to develop technologies that help with the development of parallel programs, like OpenCL.

There is a revolution coming – the way we use technology is changing. Jonathan’s talk was a reminder to all of us who design hardware and software:  we need to stay connected with the customer. Designing technology for technology’s sake is not the answer.

What are your thoughts on this topic? I’d love to hear your take on it.

Margaret Lewis, director, AMD commercial software and solutions

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD.

Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

@margaretjlewis