Category: Cavium

World’s Most Powerful ARM Desktop: Marvell ThunderXStation ThunderX2 Workstation

Posted by – November 5, 2018

Gigabyte announces the industry’s first ARMv8 workstation based on Cavium’s ThunderX2 ARM64 multi-core processor. This 4U workstation is called the ThunderXStation. GIGABYTE has designed and is manufacturing the ThunderXStation. The 4U tower is 27″ (D) x 17″ (H) x 7″ (W) and designed for floor mounting. The power supply included is a 800W PSU with a 1+1 redundant option. The motherboard is a standard GIGABYTE motherboard form factor.

The motherboard includes:
Dual or single ThunderX2 processor support. Optionally with LGA 4077 socket.
Integrated chipset.
8x DIMMs per CPU.
DDR4 2666/2400/2133 MHz DIMMs.
1x Management LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps.
Integrated VGA, 1920×1200.
ASPEED AST2500 BMC.
2x PCIe Gen 3.0 slots per CPU. (1x x16/x8/x4/x1 AND 1x x8).
1x Type-1 OCP PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 slot per CPU.
2x NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 ports with on board SAS slim line connectors per CPU.
2x SATAIII on board connectors.
2x U.2 or SATAIII 2.5″ drive bay, supports any combination of NVMe and SATAIII SSDs.
1x RS-232 port.
4x USB 3.0 ports.
2x 8-pin GPU power connectors.

Each CPU can support upto 8 DDR4 DIMMs. The front 2.5″ drive bay supports upto 2 drives. An optional 3.5″ storage bay holds 4 drives. Initially, 2.2GHz 32-core 4-threads per core. Other SKUs will be available depending on demand. Various nVidia video cards have been tested with the open source Nouveau driver. Initial shipments include the nVidia GeForce 710 with dual monitor support. The AMDGPU driver has been tested with various AMD GPUs. Additional AMD and nVidia GPUs are being tested. Initial shipments include a 1 GbE PCIe adapter. If standard PCIe slots are in short supply a QLogic dual port 1/10 GBaseT RJ45 OCP adapter and driver are available. Units ship with Ubuntu 17.10. CentOS 7.4 and OpenSUSE are also available. Pricing is competitive with high end single and dual socket workstations from leading name brand workstation vendors with comparable Gold/Platinum processors. For the most upto date pricing and sales information on ThunderXStation please contact: http://www.phoenicselectronics.com

Cavium ThunderX2 Desktop PC made by GIGABYTE for ARM Server development

Posted by – July 18, 2018

GIGABYTE shows their Cavium ThunderX2 Workstation, an upcoming product for ARM software developmers to optimize their code for the ARM server market. It will feature dual Cavium ThunderX2 processors with 4 channels of RDIMM/LRDIMM DDR4 2666/2400Mhz memory per socket, and total capacity of 16 x DIMMS. Networking will include a dedicated MLAN port. Other specifications are still under adjustment for the final product which is something that GIGABYTE and Cavium are discussing with potential customers to satisfy a demand.

GIGABYTE shows Cavium ThunderX2 ARM Server Portfolio

Posted by – June 13, 2018

The R181-T90 is a 1U height dual socket general purpose ThunderX2 rack server with 8 channels RDIMM / ECC UDIMM DDR4 memory, 24 x DIMM slots, 1 x 25GbE SFP28 LAN port, 1 x 10GbE SFP+ LAN port (optional), 12 x 2.5” hot-swap HDD bays, 2 x OCP mezzanine slots (PCIe 3.0 x16), Aspeed AST2500 management controller, and 1+1 1600W 80 PLUS Platinum PSU. The R281-T91 is a 2U height dual socket general purpose ThunderX2 rack server with 8 channels RDIMM / ECC UDIMM DDR4 memory, 24 x DIMM slots, 1 x 25GbE SFP28 LAN port, 1 x 10GbE SFP+ LAN port (optional), 24 x 2.5” hot-swap HDD bays, 8 x PCIe 3.0 expansion slots, Aspeed AST2500 management controller, and 1+1 1600W 80 PLUS Platinum PSU. The R181-T90 and R281-T91 will be available to order from July 2018. The H261-T60 is a 2U height 4 node density optimized ThunderX2 server with dual ThunderX2 CN9975 sockets for each node (8 x sockets in total) and rear access to the node trays. The sockets will support a CPU up to 195W TDP. Each node supports 4 channels RDIMM / ECC UDIMM DDR4 memory, with 64 x DIMM slots for the system in total. The system contains in total 8 x SFP28 10G/25G LAN ports, 4 dedicated management ports, 12 x 3.5” SATA/SAS hot-swap HDD/SSD bays, 8 x low profile PCIe Gen3 expansion slots, 4 x OCP Gen3 mezzanine slots, and the system includes Aspeed AST2500 remote management controller and 1 + 1 2200W 80 PLUS Platinum redundant PSU. The H261-T60 will be available for shipping in late September or early October 2018. Find more information on GIGABYTE’s server products at http://b2b.gigabyte.com

Cavium ThunderX2 benchmarks compared with Intel and AMD

Posted by – June 5, 2018

Patrick Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief at ServeTheHome.com talks about the independent benchmarks on ThunderX2 that he published at ServeTheHome.com as Cavium announced General Availability of the ThunderX2 ARM Server at their event in San Francisco last month.

The ThunderX2 family includes over 40 different SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications, ranging from top bin 32 core 2.5GHz parts to 16-core 1.6GHz parts, mapping directly across Intel’s Xeon Skylake server CPUs from highest end Platinum to low end SKUs. With list prices for volume SKUs (32 core 2.2GHz and below) ranging from $1795 to $800, the ThunderX2 family offers 2-4X better performance per dollar compared to Xeon Skylake family of processors. The ThunderX2 family is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards. The ThunderX2 SoC family is supported by a comprehensive software ecosystem, ranging from platform level systems management and firmware to commercial Operating Systems, Development Environments and Applications. Cavium has actively engaged in server industry standards groups such as UEFI and delivered numerous reference platforms to a broad array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its leadership role in the Open Source software community driving upstream kernel enablement and toolchain optimization, actively contributing to Linaro’s Enterprise and Networking Groups, investing in key Linux Foundation projects such as DPDK, OpenHPC, OPNFV and Xen and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s Armv8 server implementation.

Cavium ThunderX2 (HPC applications and performance)

Posted by – April 6, 2018

Surya Hotha, Director, Product Marketing at Cavium, talks Innovative Alternate Architecture for Exascale Computing at the SC17 Supercomputing ARM HPC User Group event in Denver. See my other Cavium ThunderX videos here.

slideshow

Mont-Blanc ARM Supercomputer with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Next-gen ecosystem)

Posted by – February 5, 2018

Filippo Mantovani updates the audience of the GoingArm workshop at SC17 about the contributions of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to the European Project Mont-Blanc.

Since 2011, Mont-Blanc pushes the adoption of Arm technology in the High Performance Computing deploying Arm-based prototypes, enhancing system software ecosystem and projecting performance of current systems for developing new, more powerful and less power hungry HPC computing platforms based on Arm SoC.

In the talk Filippo introduces the last Mont-Blanc system, called Dibona, designed and integrated by the coordinator and industrial partner of the project, Bull/ATOS. He also talks about tests performed at BSC of the Arm software tools (HPC compiler and mathematical libraries) as well as the Dynamic Load Balancing (DLB) technique and the MUltiscale Simulator Architecture (MUSA).

You can check out the Mont-Blanc and the BSC channels to know more about the research topics of this talk.

slideshow

Cavium Octeon TX CN83XX 24-core 64bit ARMv8 for 5G Cellular Backhaul

Posted by – December 11, 2017

Cavium engineers are showing the Cavium Octeon TX 24-core 64bit ARMv8 platform handling the IPsec tunnel for future base stations to be used for the 5G backhaul, to increase bandwidth, increase coverage for cellular networks around the world. Filmed at Linaro Connect.

Atos Bull Sequana X1310 on Cavium ThunderX2 Dibona Supercomputer

Posted by – December 4, 2017

The Mont-Blanc European Exascale supercomputing project based on ARM power-efficient technology, using Cavium ThunderX2 ARM server processor to power its new High Performance Computing (HPC) prototype with HPC SW infrastructure for ARM with tools, code stacks and libraries and more. The ambition of the Mont-Blanc project is to define the architecture of an Exascale-class compute node based on the ARM architecture, and capable of being manufactured at industrial scale. The Mont-Blanc 3 system being built by a consortium which includes Atos, ARM, AVL (Austrian power train developer) and seven academic institutions, including the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC), implements this ARM for HPC with high memory bandwidth and high core count on Cavium’s custom ARMv8 core architecture with out-of-order execution that can run at 3 GHz. The ThunderX2 might be delivering twice the integer and floating point performance compared with ThunderX1 with also twice the memory bandwidth.

Filmed in 4K60 at Supercomputing 2017 in Denver using Panasonic GH5 ($1999 at Amazon.com) on firmware 2.1 (aperture priority, AF continuous tracking) with Leica 12mm f1.4 ($1297 at Amazon.com) with Sennheiser MKE440 stereo shotgun microphone ($325 at Amazon.com), get $25 off renting cameras and lenses with my referral link at https://share.lensrentals.com/x/wWbHqV

Cray ARM Supercomputer with Cavium ThunderX2 in GW4 Isambard with Simon McIntosh-Smith

Posted by – November 19, 2017

Cray announces the world’s first production-ready ARM Powered supercomputer based on the Cavium ThunderX2 64bit ARMv8-A processor, added to the Cray XC50 supercomputer enabling the world’s most flexible supercomputers, available in both liquid-cooled cabinets and air-cooled cabinets, to be available in the second quarter of 2018. Featuring a full software environment, including the Cray Linux Environment, the Cray Programming Environment, and ARM-optimized compilers, with ARM’s upcoming SVE technology as the most efficient path to achieving the vision of exascale, ARM libraries, and tools for running today’s supercomputing workloads, with the Cray Aries interconnect. Cray’s enhanced compilers and programming environment achieves more performance out of the Cavium ThunderX2 processors, up to 20 percent faster performance compared with other public domain ARMv8 compilers such as LLVM and GNU.

Cray is currently working with multiple supercomputing centers on the development of the ARM-based supercomputing systems, including various labs in the United States Department of Energy and the GW4 alliance, a coalition of four leading, research-intensive universities in the UK. Through an alliance with Cray and the Met Office in the UK, GW4 is designing and building “Isambard,” an Arm-based Cray XC50 supercomputer. The GW4 Isambard project aims to deliver the world’s first Arm-based, production-quality HPC service. My video includes an interview with Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith from the University of Bristol who says that Ease of use, robustness, and performance, are all critical for a production service, and their early experiences with Cray’s ThunderX2 systems and end-to-end ARM software environment are very promising. All of the real scientific codes they’ve tried so far have worked out of the box, and they’re also seeing performance competitive with the best in class. Having access to Cray’s optimized HPC software stack of compilers and libraries in addition to all of the open-source tools has been a real advantage.

Filmed in 4K60 at Supercomputing 2017 in Denver using Panasonic GH5 ($1999 at Amazon.com) on firmware 2.1 (aperture priority, AF continuous tracking) with Leica 12mm f1.4 ($1297 at Amazon.com) with Sennheiser MKE440 stereo shotgun microphone ($325 at Amazon.com), get $25 off renting cameras and lenses with my referral link at https://share.lensrentals.com/x/wWbHqV

Cavium ThunderX2 production systems now available

Posted by – November 18, 2017

Cavium announces ThunderX2 ARM Server systems now available for customers in server and high performance Supercomputing, partners include Bull/Atos, Cray, Gigabyte, Penguin, Ingrasys/Foxconn and HPE. After 7 years of work by partners in the ARM Server ecosystem (and 7 years of my ARM Server video-blogging), now is finally the time high performance ARM Server systems are launched for cloud computing, high performance computing markets worldwide. The Cavium ThunderX2 server SoC integrates fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual-socket configurations. ThunderX2 is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards.

ThunderX2 SoC family is supported by a comprehensive software ecosystem ranging from platform level systems management and firmware to commercial Operating Systems, Development Environments and Applications. Cavium has actively engaged in server industry standards groups such as UEFI and delivered numerous reference platforms to a broad array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its leadership role in the Open Source software community driving upstream kernel enablement and toolchain optimization, actively contributing to Linaro’s Enterprise and Networking Groups, investing in key Linux Foundation projects such as DPDK, OpenHPC, OPNFV and Xen and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s Armv8 server implementation.

Filmed in 4K60 at Supercomputing 2017 in Denver using Panasonic GH5 ($1999 at Amazon.com) on firmware 2.1 (aperture priority, AF continuous tracking) with Leica 12mm f1.4 ($1297 at Amazon.com) with Sennheiser MKE440 stereo shotgun microphone ($325 at Amazon.com), get $25 off renting cameras and lenses with my referral link at https://share.lensrentals.com/x/wWbHqV

HPE unveils The Machine, Apollo 70, Cavium ThunderX2 ARM HPC Supercomputing platforms

Posted by – November 17, 2017

HP Enterprise unveils their HPC optimized Cavium ThunderX2 ARM Powered High Performance Computing platforms, the Apollo 70 is a disruptive ARM HPC processor technology with maximum memory bandwidth, familiar management and performance tools, and the density and scalability required for large HPC cluster deployments. And then HPE Labs unveils The Machine which is also powered by a Cavium ThuderX2, it is HPE’s vision for the future of computing as by 2020, one hundred billion connected devices will generate far more demand for computing than today’s infrastructure can accommodate.

The Machine is a custom-built device made for the era of big data. HPE says it has created the world’s largest single-memory computer. The R&D program is the largest in the history of HPE, the former enterprise division of HP that split apart from the consumer-focused division. If the project works, it could be transformative for society. But it is no small effort, as it could require a whole new kind of software. HPE’s prototype can accomodate up to 160 terabytes of memory, capable of simultaneously working with the data held in every book in the Library of Congress five times over — or approximately 160 million books. According to HPE, it has never been possible to hold and manipulate whole data sets of this size in a single-memory system, and this is just a glimpse of the immense potential of Memory-Driven Computing. Following the GenZ Consortium’s vision, based on the current prototype, HPE expects the architecture can scale to an exabyte-scale single-memory system and, beyond that, to a nearly limitless pool of memory — 4,096 yottabytes. For context, that is 250,000 times the entire digital universe today. With that amount of memory, HPE said it will be possible to simultaneously work with every digital health record of every person on earth, every piece of data from Facebook, every trip of Google’s autonomous vehicles, and every data set from space exploration all at the same time — getting to answers and uncovering new opportunities at unprecedented speeds.

Filmed in 4K60 at Supercomputing 2017 in Denver using Panasonic GH5 ($1999 at Amazon.com) on firmware 2.1 (aperture priority, AF continuous tracking) with Leica 12mm f1.4 ($1297 at Amazon.com) with Sennheiser MKE440 stereo shotgun microphone ($325 at Amazon.com), get $25 off renting cameras and lenses with my referral link at https://share.lensrentals.com/x/wWbHqV

Jon Masters, Red Hat Chief ARM Architect at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017

Posted by – October 10, 2017

Jon Masters says Moores Law may have come to an end and that single threaded performance is not defining the industry anymore because it’s not increasing at the same rate that it used to. What is defining the future of the industry is machine learning, accelerators, lots of additional workload optimization that is happening outside of the core. Thus he believes ARM has an opportunity to get into the mainstream server space in the next 12-18 months with the newest powerful ARM Server solutions such as the Cavium ThunderX2 and the Qualcomm Centriq 2400. You can see some of my previous Jon Masters interviews over the past 5 years here.

Gigabyte shows Cavium ThunderX2 ARM Server with AMD/Nvidia GPGPU for HPC

Posted by – June 19, 2017

Gigabyte shows a prototype of their upcoming 2U dual socket Cavium ThunderX2 ARM Powered Server optimized form factor with customization options like using AMD or Nvidia GPGPU Cards support, very high IO bandwidth expansions, storage, a lot of RAM, among many other optimizations and features, discusses all the considerations that they are having with their customers for the design, how Gigabyte can be creative about enabling higher value to their customers who many are now looking forward to launch ARM Servers as the ThunderX2 might have a fast enough performance, and they are aiming to provide a value proposition to be the system of choice for large cloud companies and for small companies also. Also working with Redhat, Suse and Linaro, bringing up the ecosystem to enable the cloud server and high performance computing market.

Cavium ThunderX2 at Computex 2017, Windows Server on ARM, Foxconn (Ingrasys), Inventec, Gigabyte

Posted by – June 18, 2017

Cavium ThunderX2 is the world’s most powerful ARM Processor for Data Center optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads in the cloud. Cavium ThunderX2 provides the world’s biggest single thread and multi-thread dual socket ARM Server performance, with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth, up to 1TB RAM through multiple DDR4 72bit memory controllers, Thunderx2 can run Windows Server on ARM also known as the Project Olympus and it runs every type of ARM Linux Server.

24-core Cavium Octeon TX for Networking, Base Stations, Security, NAS, Gateways

Posted by – June 18, 2017

Cavium Octeon-TX family of SoCs is configured from single core up to 24-cores 64bit ARMv8.1 cores designed with Cavium’s optimized implementation of the CPU core. Cavium Octeon TX is optimized to run multiple concurrent data and control planes simultaneously for applications such as UTM & Security, Appliances, IOT Gateways, NAS, Switch Control Plane, Mainstream Control Plane, NFV and SDN infrastructure, service provider CPE, Network Attached Printers, Enterprise Access Points, Service Provider Gateways, Industrial, Military/Aero and more enabling secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking for control plane and data plane applications in networking, security, and storage.

Cavium ARM Servers M-CORD with NFV, SDN and MEC

Posted by – May 4, 2017

Cavium shows a rack of ThunderX ARMv8 servers running the complete virtualized mobile network with Multi-access Edge services live demo. These servers have 96 64-bit ARM cores in each server in dual socket configuration. ARM servers provide much better ecosystems in terms of diversified hardware solutions with scalable and great TCO and performance all running on industry standard kernel distros and virtualization software platforms.

Technologic Systems at ARM Techcon 2016

Posted by – November 26, 2016

Arizona-based Technologic Systems makes boards for embedded applications using ARM CPUs and Linux support packages. Their field applications engineer displays a range of boards with Marvell, NXP, FreeScale Semiconductor, and Cavium processors. Their BAT12 system on display is meant to provide power backup for a few hours in case of loss. They also display their range of LCD monitors with full computers built onto the back of them.

Cavium Octeon TX, 64bit ARMv8 for networking, security and storage

Posted by – November 21, 2016

Cavium, a fabless semiconductor company based in California, has on display here their Octeon TX 81XX board. It has a quad-core ARMv8 processor for embedded applications, going up to 24 cores. The demo setup consists of an IoT gateway, using temperature and humidity sensors. It can use Bluetooth, WiFi, or cellular data.

Red Hat on ARM Servers, growth opportunities at ARM Techcon 2016

Posted by – November 4, 2016

Jon Masters, Chief ARM Architect at RedHat and Yan Fisher, RedHat Hyperscale Platforms Product Marketing Lead, talk about the traction in the industry for the ARM Servers, where Red Hat talks about running the same unmodified OS on 10 different ARM SoC vendor’s hardware, where Red Hat expects significant adoption in the next 12 months as customers ask for Linux on ARM, Red Hat can help these customers deploy, support and upgrade. As next generation better ARM Server solutions are getting ready to be deployed. ARM was talking about 20% of new servers by 2020 could be ARM Servers, Red Hat is bullish and thinks it could be higher.

Cavium ThunderX2, 54-core 3Ghz 14nm ARM Server Processor

Posted by – May 31, 2016

ThunderX2 is Cavium’s Second generation ARM Server Processor product family providing one of the fastest 64bit ARMv8 Data Center & Cloud Processor, featuring high integration and high SoC performance on 14 Finfet process. With high performance custom fully out-of-order (OOO) cores, single and dual socket configurations, very high memory bandwidth, large memory capacity, integrated hardware accelerators, fully virtualized core and IO, scalable Ethernet fabric and feature rich I/O’s supporting 25Gbps. The ThunderX2 family includes multiple Workload Optimized SKUs that enable servers & appliances that are optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads in the cloud. The ThunderX2 processor family is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture specifications as well as ARM’s SBSA. ThunderX2 scales up to 54 cores with up to 3.0 GHz core frequency, fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI™) offering the largest integrated I/O capacity with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth using integrated 25Gbps SerDes, Six DDR4 72 bit memory controllers capable of supporting 3200 MHz memories with 1+TB of memory in a dual socket configuration, Hundreds of integrated hardware accelerators for security, storage, networking and virtualization applications, Fabric for interconnectivity of nodes supporting SLA enforcements with awareness and policy enforcement for virtual networks, Virtualization everywhere with Cavium virtSOC technology – Full system level low latency virtualization solution from core to I/O. Support for PCIe Gen3 x16 along with integrated 10/25/40/50/100GbE and SATAv3 ports and more.