Category: Servers

How the AppliedMicro X-Gene ARM Server Processors are designed

Posted by – December 11, 2014

AppliedMicro gives an overview of X-Gene, providing the different design components as well the various benefits in using X-Gene for compute server, storage and high performance computing. AppliedMicro is one of the initial partners with ARM in developing the ARMv8 64bit architecture, and customizing it for high performance server computing.

Also see Tour at AppliedMicro’s X-Gene Testing Lab
and AppliedMicro launching X-C1 Dev Board for 64bit Android development

Christian Reis aka Kiko, VP Hyperscale at Canonical, Mythology and Potential of the ARM Server

Posted by – December 10, 2014

ARM is the most interesting thing that could happen to servers in decades: a chance to redefine system architecture, form-factor, hardware acceleration, power consumption and the supplier ecosystem. It’s also a chance to throw away legacy and build the ideal platform for a post-cloud world (whatever that means) — if we keep our eyes on that goal. This is Kiko’s view on where we are and where we need to be in order to turn opportunity into industry-defining success.

Christian Reis – VP Hyperscale at Canonical, Kiko is responsible for next-generation server engagements & technology, including Ubuntu Server for ARM and the provisioning solution MAAS. Prior to this role, Kiko was assigned as VP Engineering to Linaro, where he participated in the organization’s conceptualization and creation. Kiko holds an MSc in Software Engineering from USP and resides in São Carlos, Brazil.

Here’s Kiko’s keynote video: “Mythology and Potential of the ARM Server”:

AppliedMicro Lab Tour, X-Gene 2 ARM Server

Posted by – December 9, 2014

AppliedMicro’s Gaurav Singh gives us a sneak peek into the development labs of X-Gene 2 showing a live demonstration ready for production, with AppliedMicro X-Gene 2 coming out for ARM Servers in 2015.

64bit AppliedMicro X-C1 Dev Board for 64bit Android and ARM Server Development available now

Posted by – December 4, 2014

World’s first 64bit ARMv8 development board (you can order it here: https://www.apm.com/products/data-center/x-gene-family/x-c1-development-kits/) based on the Octa Core X-Gene 2.4Ghz running in SMP mode available for anyone to buy today. It’s built for Servers, supports 64bit Android development, featured in the HP Moonshot ARM Server product. Designed for cloud computing and next-generation data centers, featuring custom high-performance ARMv8 cores, AppliedMicro X-Gene is the first to couple an advanced 64-bit ARM architecture with unique network and storage offload engines, as well as integrated Ethernet. The highly integrated, purpose-built X-Gene solution delivers the highest performance and lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for private cloud, public cloud, and enterprise applications.

HP Moonshot ARM Server runs AppliedMicro X-Gene 64bit ARMv8 Octa-Core

Posted by – November 25, 2014

Clark and Linda of HP give an inside look at HP’s Moonshot system configured with their new m400 ARM cartridges. Each cartridge is an individual 64-bit ARM server using AppliedMicro’s X-Gene SOC, with 8 cores and 64Gb of RAM with 2 Mellanox 10G NICs. The servers are running OpenStack with a mix of cloud controller services and Nova compute nodes.

Linda Knippers of HP talks about m400 ARM Server cartridge in HP Moonshot

Posted by – November 25, 2014

Linda from HP describes HP’s new Moonshot systems, including the new m400 ARM server cartridge, which was demoed at Linaro Connect. HP has launched the TI 32bit and the AppliedMicro X-Gene 64bit ARM Server in HP Moonshot.

Paper Battery ultrathin flexible batteries and supercapacitors

Posted by – November 16, 2014

The Paper Battery Company develops super capacitors with very high energy and power density and flexible form factors. These devices recharge very quickly, and hold enough energy to take care of peak performance usage. The form factors that they are developing give designers more choices and options on how to fit power in previously unusable spaces. Applications for the Paper Battery technology range from mobile wearable devices to backup power in computing. They have two product lines that meet a varied set of needs, in all cases they can relieve battery anxiety, improve performance, and enable smaller, lighter products and reduce costs for the customer.

You can contact Paper Battery Company here (please tell them you saw this video):
Shreefal Mehta, CEO
smehta@paperbatteryco.com
http://paperbatteryco.com

Lenovo acquires IBM’s x86 server business

Posted by – November 16, 2014

Jonathan Hinkle, Director of Enterprise Server System Architecture at Lenovo, Chairman of the Open Server Summit, talks about Software Defined Storage, Network and Compute, featuring open source, open standards to lower costs and accelerate innovation in the server market. Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 Server Business last month, integrating all of IBM’s x86 server products into Lenovo’s server portfolio

OpenPower Foundation Opening the Power Architecture for Servers

Posted by – November 16, 2014

The OpenPOWER Foundation was founded in 2013 as an open technical membership organization that will enable data centers to rethink their approach to technology. Member companies are enabled to customize POWER CPU processors and system platforms for optimization including for custom systems for large or warehouse scale data centers, workload acceleration through GPU, FPGA or advanced I/O, platform optimization for SW appliances, or exploitation of advanced hardware.

Anil Vasudeva, President of IMEX Research talks Software Defined Data Centers

Posted by – November 16, 2014

Anil Vasudeva, President and Chief Analyst at IMEX Research talks about Software Defined Data Centers, Software Defined Storage and Software Defined Networks, that have been coming strong in the last two years, bringing the operating costs down which is the main feature data centers are looking for.

TI Keystone II ARM+DSP Server for Worlds Most Power Efficient Super Computers

Posted by – September 24, 2014

Gil Pitney demonstrates how Texas Instruments’ Keystone II ARM+DSP multicore SoCs are ideal for “green supercomputing”, performing demanding High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads at lower power. TI’s Mulicore SDK for HPC (MCSDK-HPC) examples show how TI’s OpenCL driver and the OpenMP 4.0 Accelerator Model allow demanding scientific computations to be easily offloaded and distributed to the 8 DSP cores.

Cavium ThunderX 48 Core 2.5Ghz ARM Server SoC

Posted by – June 6, 2014

Cavium launches the world’s fastest ARM Processor in their family of workload optimized ThunderX 64bit ARMv8 Server Processors (including ThunderX_CP for Cloud, ThunderX_ST for Storage, ThunderX_SC for Security and ThunderX_NT for Networking), for a range of applications in the cloud and data center. With 48 cores running at 2.5GHz each, ThunderX is the world’s highest performing low-power 64-bit ARMv8 SoC family of workload optimized processors with a range of SKUs and form factors for high performance volume compute, storage, secure compute and networking specific workloads. Analysts predict that the global data center infrastructure market, including servers, storage, networking, security and virtualization, will reach $128 billion in 2014. Cavium is hereby taking their share of that market by releasing their extremely high performance custom design ARM Server processor.

This product family is based on highly efficient full custom processor cores designed by Cavium in 28nm process technology under architectural license from ARM. It is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture as well as ARM’s Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard while bringing to market dramatic enhancements that include:

-The first ARM based SoC that scales up to 48 cores with up to 2.5 GHz core frequency with 78K of I-Cache and 32K of D-Cache along with 16MB of L2 cache.
– The first ARM based SOC to be fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI™)
– Integrated I/O capacity with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth
– Four DDR3/4 72 bit memory controllers capable of supporting 2400 MHz memories with 1TB of memory in a dual socket configuration
– Hundreds of integrated hardware accelerators for security, storage, networking and virtualization applications.
– Standard based low latency Ethernet fabric interconnecting thousands of ThunderX™ nodes in 2D and 3D configurations and enabling fabric monitoring and SLA enforcements with awareness and policy enforcement for virtualized networks.
– Virtualization everywhere with Cavium virtSOC™ technology – Full system virtualization for low latency from virtual machine to I/O.
– Best in class performance per watt and performance per dollar for the target applications

Read more: press release

HiSilicon D01, 16-core ARM Cortex-A15 presented by Huawei


Here’s the 16-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor from HiSilicon Huawei on a development board for ARM Powered Networking and Servers coming up. Hacked on in this video by Linaro Toolchain Engineer Rob Savoye (2), who now is climbing the Mount Everest. Linux kernel v3.13 is running on this board, with three SATA ports and two Gigabit ethernet ports driver ready. The BSP code will soon be upgraded to kernel v3.14 and be upstreamed in parallel. Source code and binaries are released through Linaro website. Ubuntu Server is verified on this board. In this demo, it runs a GCC toolchain native build. Linaro Toolchain Working Group plans to use this board to run multiple builds per board, to maximally saturate D01’s computing and storage capability.

Kernel source: http://git.linaro.org/landing-teams/working/hisilicon/kernel.git (branch: integration-hilt-d01)
Binary release: http://www.linaro.org/downloads/ (found ‘HiSilicon D01’)
WiKi page: https://wiki.linaro.org/Boards/D01

Linaro engineers implementing ACPI for ARMv8

Posted by – March 13, 2014

Linaro is working on implementing ACPI for general purpose servers using the ARMv8 architecture. This has been controversial as it is a competing technology to FDT which has been used now for the 32bit ARM world.

ACPI has been chosen on for the general purpose servers to allow standard distributions such as RHEL and Ubuntu server to boot on hardware which they have no special support in the same way as x86 world. ACPI is used to abstract the hardware to the level the standard distribution can boot to the point it can be useful.

There is a large overlap between FDT and ACPI but they actually do things a different way. FDT is currently holding fast the the mobile and tablets market for ARM. But with Intel implementing ACPI phones and tablets nothing is certain for the future.

)

Linaro Enterprise Group LEG accelerating Linux development on ARM Servers

Posted by – March 11, 2014

The Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) is dedicated to accelerate Linux ARM server ecosystem development and extends the list of Linaro members beyond ARM silicon vendors to Server OEM’s and commercial Linux providers.

Linaro Enterprise Group (ARM Servers) engineers Ed Nevill, Leif Lindholm, Andrea Gallo, Al Stone, Hanjun Guo share key achievements in the OpenJDK, HipHopVM, UEFI and ACPI areas, building on new hardware, defining plans towards upstream acceptance, solving bugs and more.

)

CAVIUM 64bit ARMv8 for Servers and Base Stations

Posted by – February 25, 2014

Cavium talks about and shows their latest enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking OCTEON and OCTEON Fusion SoCs based on ARMv8 64bit and MIPS, making customized optimized core designs for each in use for cloud servers and base stations among other. CAVIUM claims that their ARMv8 64bit enterprise/server design, due to be released later this year, provides more performance at lower power consumption than Intel´s x86.

Linaro Enterprise Group Manager Andrea Gallo

Posted by – January 1, 2014

The Linaro-hosted “Enterprise Group” (LEG) is dedicated to accelerate Linux ARM server ecosystem development and extends the list of Linaro members beyond ARM silicon vendors to Server OEM’s and commercial Linux providers.

Latest ARM Server solutions booths tour

Posted by – December 30, 2013

Showing off the latest Applied Micro 64bit X-Gene ARM Server Development Board (which Rob Savoye of Linaro eagerly wants to start playing with), Dell’s 64bit ARM Server solution running Fedora 19, working on a proof of concept for early 2014 for Dell’s key cloud server customers (Google? Amazon?) before going into mass production (Dell already did some 32bit ARM Server tests in Europe with some customers), some things like Oracle JDK still has to fully come over (needs some tuning) to the platform. This is just me walking kind of randomly around some of the ARM Server demo area at the ARM Techcon. Then checking out the HP ARM Server booth, showing off some of the latest HP Moonshot ARM Server solutions also talked about in HP’s Keynote at ARM Techcon, watch the official video of that keynote or my version (sitting on the front row).

AMD at ARM Techcon 2013

Posted by – December 26, 2013

AMD in 2014 will be delivering a 64bit ARM processor for servers. The ARM Architecture and Ecosystem enables servers to achieve greater performance per watt and greater performance per dollar. The code name for the product is Seattle. AMD Seattle is expected to reach mass market cloud servers in the second half of 2014.

Calxeda ECX-2000 ARM Cortex-A15 Server Processor

Posted by – December 3, 2013

Calxeda shows their new ARM Cortex-A15 based ECX-2000 supporting 16GB RAM on quad-core, used by HP in one of their new HP Moonshot ARM Server platform. Performance is 2x to 3x faster than their previous ARM Cortex-A9 Server platform. Calxeda also has 2 64bit ARM Server chips on their Roadmap with full production systems to be expected for early 2015 or so.

You can read more about Calxeda ECX-2000 at http://www.calxeda.com/ecx-2000-family/