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This may seem irrelevant, but as a GPU computing researcher, I'm still disappointed that GPU still hasn't made its way to be the first citizen at data centers. I know world of HPC looks much different, but I wonder when GPU can be vastly used in data centers, and will NVIDIA's Pascal architecture make a huge impact on this?

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I don't think GPUs will be big with "web services" datacenters anytime soon.

As the slides mentioned, the difference between this web-services stuff and HPC is that HPC has a much higher compute/data ratio. Said another way, this web-services stuff is all about moving data, collating it a bit, and less about intensive mathematical processing of it.

Most of the boxes in the diagrams are datastores. Block stores, object stores, columnar stores, caches. I hate to say it but... big data. Not (as) big compute.

They are. With as much neural networks stuff as Google does, it's pretty obvious tons of GPU-hours must be in use.

http://www.wired.com/2013/05/gpus-in-the-data-center/

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