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  • Tilera, SeaMicro: The era of ultra high density computing

    The Register did an article recently following up on a press release from Tilera. The news this week is Tilera is now working on the next big thing, Quanta will be shipping a 2U rack mounted computer with 512 processing cores inside. Why is that significant? Well 512 is the magic number quoted in the announcement last week from upstart server maker SeaMicro. The SM10000 from SeaMicro boasts 512 Intel cores inside a 10U box. Which makes me wonder who or what is all this good for? Based solely on press releases and articles written to date about Tilera, their targeted customers aren’t quite as general say as SeaMicro. Even though each core in a Tilera cpu can run it’s own OS and share data, it is up to the device manufacturers licensing the Tilera chip to do the heavy lifting of developing the software and applications that make all that raw iron do useful work. The cpus on the SeaMicro hardware however are full Intel x86 capable Atom cpus tied together with a lot of management hardware and software provided by SeaMicro. Customers in this case are most likely going to load software applications they already have in operation on existing Intel hardware. Development time or re-coding or recompiling is unnecessary as SeaMicro’s value add is the management interface for all that raw iron. Quanta is packaging up the Tilera in a way that will make it more palatable to a potential customer who might also be considering buying SeaMicro’s project. It all depends on what apps you want to run, what performance you expect, and how dense you need all your cores to be when they are mounted in the rack. Numerically speaking, the race for ultimate density right now the Quanta SQ2 wins with 512 general purpose CPUs in a 2U rack mount. SeaMicro has 512 in a 10U rack mount. However, that in now way reflects the differences in the OSes and types of applications and performance you might see when using either piece of hardware.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/20/tilera_tile64_chip/ (The Register August 20, 2007)

    “Hot Chips The multi-core chip revolution advanced this week with the emergence of Tilera – a start-up using so-called mesh processor designs to go after the networking and multimedia markets.”

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/28/tilera_new_ceo/ (The Register September 28, 2007)

    “Tahernia arrives at Tilera from FPGA shop Xilinx where he was general manager in charge of the Processing Solutoins (sic) Group.”

    http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/64way-chip-gains-Linux-IDE-dev-cards-design-wins/
    (Linux for Devices April 30 2008)

    “Tilera introduced a Linux-based development kit for its scalable, 64-core Tile64 SoC (system-on-chip). The company also announced a dual 10GbE PCIExpress card based on the chip (pictured at left), revealed a networking customer win with Napatech, and demo’d the Tile64 running real-time 1080P HD video.”

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/23/tilera_cpu_upgrade/ (The Register September 23 2008)

    “This week, Tilera is putting its second-generation chips into the field and is getting some traction among various IT suppliers, who want to put the Tile64 processors and their homegrown Linux environment to work.”

    “Tilera was founded in Santa Clara, California, in October 2004. The company’s research and development is done in its Westborough, Massachusetts lab, which makes sense given that the Tile64 processor that is based on an MIT project called Raw. The Raw project was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, back in 1996, and it delivered a 16-core processor connected by a mesh of on-core switches in 2002.”

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26/tilera_third_gen_mesh_chips/ (The Register October 26 2009)

    “Upstart massively multicore chip designer Tilera has divulged the details on its upcoming third generation of Tile processors, which will sport from 16 to 100 cores on a single die.”

    http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/323692/tilera_targets_intel_amd_100-core_processor/#comments
    (Good Gear Guide October 26 2009)

    “Look at the markets Tilera is aiming these chips at. These applications have lots of parallelism, require very high throughput, and need a low power footprint. The benefits of a system using a custom processor are large enough that paying someone to write software for the job is more than worth it.”

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/02/tilera_quanta_servers/ (The Register November 2 2009)

    “While Doud was not at liberty to reveal the details, he did tell El Reg that Tilera had inked a deal with Quanta that will see the Taiwanese original design manufacturer make servers based on the future Tile-Gx series of chips, which will span from 16 to 100 RISC cores and which will begin to ship at the end of 2010.”

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/09/tilera_vc_funding/ (The Register March 9 2010)

    “The current processors have made some design wins among networking, wireless infrastructure, and communications equipment providers, but the Tile-Gx series is going to give gear makers a slew of different options.”

  • Big Web Operations Turn to Tiny Chips – NYTimes.com

    Stephen O’Grady, a founder at the technology analyst company RedMonk, said the technology industry often has swung back and forth between more standard computing systems and specialized gear.

    via Big Web Operations Turn to Tiny Chips – NYTimes.com.

    A little tip of the hat to Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro the startup company that announced it’s first product last week. The giant 512 cpu computer is being covered in this NYTimes article to spotlight the ‘exotic’ technologies both hardware and software some companies use to deploy huge web apps. It’s part NoSQL part low power massive parallelism.

  • SeaMicro Announces SM10000 Server with 512 Atom CPUs

    From where I stand, the SM10000 looks like the type of product that if you could benefit from having it, you’ve been waiting for something like it. In other words, you will have been asking for something like the SM10000 for quite a while already. SeaMicro is simply granting your wish.

    via SeaMicro Announces SM10000 Server with 512 Atom CPUs and Low Power Consumption – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

    This announcement that has been making the rounds this Monday June 14th has hit Wired.com, Anandtech, Slashdot, everywhere. It is a press release full court press. But it is an interesting product on paper for anyone who is doing analysis of datasets using large numbers of CPUs for regressions or large scale simulations too. And it is at it’s core virtual Machines, with virtual peripherals (memory, disk, networking). I don’t know how you benchmark something like this, but it is impressive in its low power consumption and size. It only takes up 10U of a 42U rack. It fits 512 CPUs in that 10U area as well.

    Imagine 324 of these plugged in and racked up

    This takes me back to the days of RLX Technologies when blade servers were so new nobody knew what they were good for. The top of the line RLX unit had 324 CPUs in a 42U rack. And each blade had a Transmeta Crusoe processor which was designed to run at a lower clock speed and much more efficiently from a thermal standpoint. When managed by the RLX chassis hardware and software and paired up to an F5 Networks load balancer BIG-IP, the whole thing was an elegant design. However the advantage of using Transmeta’s CPU was lost on a lot of people, including technology journalists who bashed it for being too low performance for most IT shops and data centers. Nobody had considered the total cost of ownership including the cooling and electricity. In those days, clock speed was the only measure of a server’s usefulness.

    Enter Google into the data center market, and the whole scale changes. Google didn’t care about clock speed nearly as much as lowering its total overall costs for its huge data centers. Even the technical journalists began to understand the cost savings of lowering the clock speed a few hundred megahertz and placing servers more densely into a fixed sized data center. Movements in the High Performance computing also led to large scale installations of commodity servers being all bound together into one massively parallel super computer. More space was needed for physical machines racked up in the data centers. Everyone could see the only way to build out was to build more data centers, build bigger data centers or pack more servers into the existing footprint of current data centers. Manufacturers like Compaq got into the Blade server market, along with IBM and Hewlett Packard. Everyone engineered their own proprietary interfaces and architectures, but all of them focused on the top of the line server CPUs from Intel. As a result, the heat dissipation was enormous and the densities of these blade centers was pretty low (possibly 14 CPUs in a 4U rack mount).

    Blue Gene super computer has high density motherboards
    Look at all those CPUs on one motherboard!

    IBM began to experiment with lower clocked PowerPC chips in a massively parallel super computer called the Blue Gene. In my opinion this started to change people’s belief about what direction data center architectures could go. The density of the ‘drawers’ in the Blue Gene server cabinets is pretty high. Lot more CPUs, power supplies, storage and RAM in each unit than in a comparable base level commodity server from Dell or HP (the previous most common building block for the massively parallel super computers). Given these trends it’s very promising to see what Seamicro has done with its first product. I’m not saying this is a super computer in a 10U box, but there are plenty of workloads that would fit within the scope of this server’s capabilities. And what’s cooler is the virtual abstraction of all the hardware from the RAM, to the networking to the storage. It’s like the golden age of IBM machine partitioning and Virtual Machines but on an Intel architecture. Depending on how quickly they can ramp up production and market their goods, Seamicro might be game changer or it might be a takeover target from the likes of HP or IBM.

    Related articles

  • Seagate, Toshiba to Make SSD + HDD Hybrid?

    Seagate, Toshiba to Make SSD + HDD Hybrid?.

    Some people may remember the poorly marketed and badly implemented Microsoft ReadyBoost technology hyped prior to the launch of Windows Vista. Microsoft’s intention was to speed throughput on machines without sufficient RAM memory to cache large parts of the Windows OS and shared libraries. By using a small Flash memory module on

    Intel Turbo memory module for PCIe
    Intel Turbo Memory to be used as ReadyDrive storage cache

    the motherboard (Intel’s Turbo Memory) or by using a USB connected Flash memory stick one could create a Flash memory cache that would offset the effect of having 512MB or less RAM installed. In early testing done by folks like Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware system performance suffered terribly on computers with more than the 512MB of RAM targeted by Microsoft. By trying to use these techniques to offset the lack of RAM on computers with more than 512MB of RAM the computers ran slower using Vista. I had great hopes ReadyBoost at the time the flash cache method of speeding throughput on a desktop PC was heralding a new early of desktop PC performance. In the end it was all a myth created by the Microsoft marketing department.

    Some time has passed since then Vista was released. RAM prices have slowly gone down. Even low end machines have more than adequate RAM installed to run Vista or now Windows 7 (no more machines with 512MB of RAM). The necessity of working around those limits of RAM is unnecessary. However total system level I/O has seen some gains through using somewhat expensive Flash based SSD (solid state disks). Really this is what we have all been waiting for all along. It’s flash memory modules like the ones Intel tried using for it’s  ReadyDrive capable Turbo Memory technology. However these were wired into a PCIe controller and optimized for fast I/O, faster than a real spinning hard disk. The advantage over the ReadyBoost was the speed of the PCIe interface connected to the Flash memory chips. Enterprise data centers have begun using some Flash SSDs as caches with some very high end product using all Flash SSDs in their storage arrays. The entry level price though can be daunting to say the least. 500GB SSD disks are the top of the line, premium priced products and not likely to be sold in large quantity until the prices come down.

    Seagate is now offering a product that has a hybrid Flash cache and spinning disk all tied into one SATA disk controller.

    Seagate hybrid hard drive
    Seagate Momentus XT

    The beauty of this design is the OS doesn’t enter into the fray. So it’s OS agnostic. Similarly the OS doesn’t try to be a disk controller. Seagate manages all the details on its side of the SATA controller and OS just sees what it thinks is a  hard disk that it sends read/write commands. In theory this sounds like a step up from simple spinning disks and maybe a step below a full flash based SSD. What is the performance of a hybrid drive like this?

    As it turns out The Register did publish a follow-up with a quick benchmark (performed by Seagate) of the Seagate Moments XT compared to middle and top of the line spinning hard drives. The Seagate hybrid drive performs almost as well as an the Western Digital SSD included in the benchmark. That flash memory caches the stuff that needs quick access, and is able to refine what it stores over time based on what it is accessed most often by the OS. Your boot times speed up, file read/write times speed up all as a result of the internal controller on the hybrid drive. The availability if you check Amazon’s website is 1-2months which means you and I cannot yet purchase this item. But it’s encourage and I would like to see some more innovation in this product category. No doubt lots of optimization and algorithms can be tried out to balance the Flash memory and spinning hard disks. I say this because of the static ram cache that’s built into the Momentus XT which is 32MBytes in size. Decide when data goes in and out, which cache it uses (RAM or Flash) and when it finally gets written to disk is one of those difficult Computer Science type optimization problems. And there are likely as many answers as there are Computer Scientists to compute the problem. There will be lots of room to innovate if this product segment takes hold.

  • Disk I/O: PCI Based SSDs (via makeitfaster)

    Great article and lots of hardcore important details like drivers and throughput. It’s early days yet for the PCI based SSDs, so there’s going to be lots of changes and architectures until a great design or a cheap design begins to dominate the market. And while some PCIe cards may not be ready for the Enterprise Data Center, there may be a market in the high end gamer fanboy product segment. Stay Tuned!

    Disk I/O: PCI Based SSDs The next step up from a regular sata based Solid State Disk is the PCIe based solid state disk. They bypass the SATA bottleneck and go straight through the PCI-Express bus, and are able to achieve better throughput. The access time is similar to a normal SSD, as that limit is imposed by the NAND chips themselves, and not the controller. So how is this different than taking a high end raid controller in a PCIe slot and slapping 8 or 12 good SSDs o … Read More

    via makeitfaster

  • Announcing the first free software Blu-ray encoder

    Diary Of An x264 Developer » (4/25/2010)

    For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools.  Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer.

    The move towards Blu-ray encoding is very encouraging. In reading the article I don’t see a mention of CUDA or OpenCL acceleration of the encoding process. As was the case for MPEG-2 a glaring need for acceleration of the process was painfully obvious once people started converting long form videos. I know x264 encoding can be accelerated by splitting threads across CPUs on a multi-core processor. But why not unleash the floodgates and get some extra horsepower from the ATI or nVidia graphics card too. We’re talking large frames and large frame rates and the only way to guarantee adoption of the new format is to make the encoding process fast, fast, fast.

  • Apple admits to eating ‘iPad chip designer’ • The Register

    Last year, Samsung told the world it had teamed with Instrinsity on a 1GHz ARM chip known as the Hummingbird, and Samsung manufactures the ARM chips underpinning the Apple iPhone, a smaller version of the iPad. This has led many to assume that the Hummingbird architecture is the basis for the the A4.

    via Apple admits to eating ‘iPad chip designer’ • The Register.

    I am sure that Apple’s ability to act quickly and independently helped win them not just design expertise, but an actual nearly finished CPU in the form of the Hummingbird project. There does now seem to be a smartphone Megahertz War similar to the bad old days of desktop computing when AMD and Intel fought it out 1 gigahertz at a time. We will see what comes of this when the new iPhones come out this Summer. A4 may not translate into a handheld cpu form factor. But looking at the iFixit teardown of the iPad makes me think the iPad motherboard is almost the size of a cell phone! So who knows, maybe A4 is scalable down to iPhone as well. We’ll find out in June I’m sure when Apple hosts its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, CA.

  • Augmented Reality intersects with GPS Navigation

    smartphones and GPS
    It doesn't matter what device you use, it is all about the software

    TomTom is releasing a new personal navigation device (PND) called the TomTom Live 1000.  As part of this article from MacNN they mention TomTom is attempting to get into the App Store market by creating its own marketplace for TomTom specific software add-ons (like the Apple App Store). The reason is the cold war going on between device manufacturers gaining the upper hand by wholesale adoption of a closed application software universe. Google is doing it with Android and Apple has done it with the iPhone and iPad. Going all the way back to the iPod, there was interest in running games on those handheld devices, but no obvious way to ‘sell’ them, until the App Store came out. Now TomTom is following suit, by redesigning the whole TomTom universe using Webkit as a key component of it’s new OS on TomTom devices (Webkit is also being used in the Android based Garmin A10 phone too).  Ambivalent about the added value? Other than trying to gain some market share against PND manufacturers, Harold Goddijn, the CEO of TomTom says it’s all about innovation. They mention in passing the possibility of Augmented Reality apps for TomTom devices. But there’s a small matter of getting a video feed into the PND that can then be layered with the AR software. And honestly even the CEO Tom Goodjin is somewhat ambivalent about seizing the opportunity of Augmented Reality in the TomTom application store universe. As reported on Pocket-lint.com: “Although Goddjin confirmed that the company was looking at the possibility of adding augmented reality in to the mix, the niche technology isn’t a major objective for them.”

    It’s not enough to just overlay information on an Apple iPhone or TomTom PND screen showing related points of interest (POI). Like the iPhone Nearest Tube app from Acrossair, knowing the general compass direction to a subway station is useful. But full step-by-step navigating to it seems to be the next logical step, maps and all. What makes me think of this is the recent announcement of the Garmin A10 smartphone with GPS navigation. If Garmin, TomTom or an independent developer could mashup Augmented Reality with their respective navigation engines, whilst throwing  in a bit of Google Street View one might, just might have the most useful personal assistant for finding places on foot. Garmin has a whole slew of devices for the hiking, and bicycling market. They even offer walking/pedestrian directions on their automobile navigation devices. So the overlay of Augmented Reality/Point-of-Interest and full-on Garmin Navigation to me would be a truly killer app.

  • AppleInsider | Google to bring free turn-by-turn navigation to Apple iPhone (NOT)

    Google now denies they are releasing Google Maps for the iPhone. Take this whole article with a big grain of salt. I’m just glad I didn’t post this immediately after reading the original article on AppleInsider. By the end of the day last Friday April 23rd, Google was denying the rumor already. The moral of the story is look before you leap.

    Google this week said it plans to bring Google Maps Navigation, its free turn-by-turn GPS software already available on Android, as an application for Apple’s iPhone.

    According to MacUser, Google officials confirmed at a London, England, press conference that its satellite navigation software would be coming to “other” platforms, including the iPhone. No dates for potential availability were given

    via AppleInsider | Google to bring free turn-by-turn navigation to Apple iPhone.

    April 23rd 2010 Amazing, just when you thought you knew what was going on Google can come along and change things entirely. I ask how does one give away GPS navigation? Four years ago this couldn’t have been conceived or dreamed of given the market for GPS navigation. Now, meh, just give it away. I wish Google great success as this is almost compelling enough for me to get an iPhone now.

    Previously you needed an Android based Smartphone usually available only on Verizon. But now there’s a multitude off choices, Garmin’s A50 is coming to AT&T and has my favorite navigation interface along with Google Maps if you want it. Which is what I would prefer. I’m hoping Garmin continues to evolve this to integrate any and all live data it cannot incorporate with its stand alone navigation units which to date don’t have live internet connections (whereas TomTom Live! units do). I’m most interested in any live data that might benefit me in a sudden traffic jam or a new Point of Interest not compiled since the last download/update to the navigation software.

    Google’s entry to the iPhone navigation arena would force TomTom, Navigon, and now Garmin all to take heed and compete more vigorously especially since Google would be giving its software away. I’m guessing they could promote themselves as being advertisement free alternatives to the Google Maps Navigation?

  • Genius Inventor Alan Kay Reveals All then gets stiffed by the App Store

    I wonder: Is there an opportunity for Alan Kay’s Dynabook? An iPad with a Sqeak implementation that enables any user to write his or her own applications, rather than resorting to purchasing an app?

    via Did Steve Jobs Steal The iPad? Genius Inventor Alan Kay Reveals All. (source: 6:20 PM – April 17, 2010 by Wolfgang Gruener, Tom’s Hardware)

    Apple earlier this month instituted a new rule that also effectively blocks meta-platforms: clause 3.3.1, which stipulates that iPhone apps may only be made using Apple-approved programming languages. Many have speculated that the main target of the new rule was Adobe, whose CS5 software, released last week, includes a feature to easily convert Flash-coded software into native iPhone apps.

    Some critics expressed concern that beyond attacking Adobe, Apple’s policies would result in collateral damage potentially stifling innovation in the App Store. Scratch appears to be a victim despite its tie to Jobs’ old friend.

    Apple Rejects Kid-Friendly Programming App (April 20, 2010 2:15 pm)

    What a difference 3 days makes right? Tom’s Hardware did a great retrospective on the ‘originality’ of the iPad and learned a heck of a lot of Computer History along the way. At the end of the article they plug Alan Kay’s Squeak based programming environment called Scratch. It is a free application that is used to create new graphical programs and is used as a means to teach mathematics problem-solving through writing programs in Scratch. The iPad was the next logical step in the distribution of the program, giving kids free access to it whenever and on whatever platform was available. But two days later, the announcement came out the Apple App Store, the only venue by which to purchase or even download software onto the iPhone or the iPad had roundly reject Scratch. The App Store will not allow it to be downloaded and that’s the end of that. The reasoning is Scratch (which is really a programming tool) has an interpreter built-in which allows it to execute the programs written within its programming environment. Java does this, Adobe Flash does this, it’s common with anything that’s like a programming tool. But Apple has forbidden anything that looks, sounds, or smells like a potential way of hijacking or hacking into their devices. So Scratch and Adobe Flash are now both forbidden to run on the Apple iPad. How quickly things change don’t they especially if you read the whole Tom’s Hardware article. Alan Kay and Steve Jobs are presented as really friendly towards one another.