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Tag: tilera

  • Quanta crams 512 cores into pizza box server • The Register

    Image representing Tilera as depicted in Crunc...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Two of these boards are placed side-by-side in the chassis and stacked two high, for a total of eight server nodes. Eight nodes at 64 cores each gives you 512 total cores in a 2U chassis. The server boards slide out on individual trays and share two 1,100 watt power supplies that are stacked on top of each other and that are put in the center of the chassis. Each node has three SATA II ports and can have three 2.5-inch drives allocated to it; the chassis holds two dozen drives, mounted in the front and hot pluggable.

    via Quanta crams 512 cores into pizza box server • The Register.

    Amazing how power efficient Tilera has made it’s shipping products as Quanta has jammed 512 cores into a 2 Rack Unit high box. Roughly this is 20% the size of the SeaMicro SM-10000 based on Intel Atom cpus. Now that there’s a shipping product, I would like to see benchmarks or comparisons made on similar workloads using both sets of hardware. Numerically speaking it will be an apples-to-apples comparison. But each of these products is unique and are going to be difficult to judge in the coming year.

    First off, Intel Atom is an x86 compatible low power chip that helped launch the Asus/Acer netbook revolution (which until the iPad killed it was a big deal). However Quanta in order to get higher density on its hardware has chosen a different CPU than the Intel Atom (as used by SeaMicro). Instead Quanta is the primary customer for a new innovated chip company we have covered on carpetbomberz.com previously: Tilera. For those who have not been following the press releases from the company Tilera is a spin-off of an MIT research project in chip-scale networking. The idea was to create very simplified systems on a chip (whole computers scaled down to single chip) and then network them together all the same slice of silicon die. The speeds would be faster due to most of the physical interfaces and buses being contained directly on the chip circuits instead of externally on the computer’s motherboard. The promise of the Tilera chip is you can scaled up on the silicon wafer as opposed to the racks and racks of equipment within the datacenter. Performance of the Tilera chip has been somewhat a secret, no benchmarks or real comparisons to commercially shipping CPUs have been performed. But the feeling generally is any single core within a Tilera chip should be about as capable as the processor in your smartphone, and every bit as power efficient. Tilera has been planning to scale up to 100 cpus eventually within one single processor die and appears to have scaled up to 64 on its most recent research chips (far from being commercially produced at this point.)

    I suspect both SeaMicro and Quanta will have their own custom OSes which run as a central supervisor allowing the administrators to install and sets up instances of their  favorite workhorse OSes. Each OS instance will be doled out to an available CPU core and then be linked up to a virtual network and virtual storage interface. Boom! You got a web server, file server, rendering station, streaming server, whatever you need in one fell swoop. And it is all bound together with two 1,100 watt power supplies in each 2 Rack Unit sized box. I don’t know how that compares to the SeaMicro power supply, but I imagine it is likely smaller per core than the SM-10000. Which can only mean in the war for data power efficiency Quanta might deliver to market a huge shot across the bow of SeaMicro. All I can say is let the games begin, let the market determine the winner.

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  • Chip upstart Tilera in the news

    Diagram Of A Partial Mesh Network
    Diagram Of A Partial Mesh Network

    As of early 2010, Tilera had over 50 design wins for the use of its SoCs in future networking and security appliances, which was followed up by two server wins with Quanta and SGI. The company has had a dozen more design wins since then and now claims to have over 150 customers who have bought prototypes for testing or chips to put into products.

    via Chip upstart Tilera lines up $45m in funding • The Register.

    There’s not been a lot of news about Tilera most recently, but they are still selling products, raising funds through private investments. Their product road map is showing great promise as well. I want to see more of their shipping product get tested in the online technology website arena. I don’t care if Infoworld, Network World, Tom’s Hardware or Anandtech does it. Whether it’s security devices or actual multi-core servers it would be cool to see Tilera compared even if it was an apples and oranges type of test. On paper it appears the mesh network of Tilera’s multi-core cpus is designed to set it apart from any other product currently available on the market. Similarly the ease of accessing the cores through the mesh network is meant to make the use of a single system image much easier as it is distributed across all the cores almost invisibly. In a word Tilera and its next closest competitor SeaMicro are cloud computing in a single solitary box.

    Cloud computing for those who don’t know is an attempt to create a utility like the water system or electrical system in the town where you live. The utility has excess capacity, and what it doesn’t use it sells off to connected utility systems. So you always will have enough power to cover your immediate needs with a little in reserve for emergencies. On the days where people don’t use as much electricity you cut back on production a little or sell off the excess to someone who needs it. Now imagine that electricity is computer cycles doing additions, subtractions or longer form mathematical analysis all in parallel and scaling out to extra computer cores as needed depending on the workload. Amazon has a service they sell like this already, Microsoft too. You sign up to use their ‘compute cloud’ and load your applications, your data and just start crunching away while the meter runs. You get billed based on how much of the computing resource you used.

    Nowadays, unfortunately, in data centers you got single purpose servers doing one thing, sitting idle most of the time. This has been a going concern so much so that a whole industry has cropped up of splitting those machines into thinner slices with software like VMWare. Those little slivers of a real computer then take up all the idle time of that once single purpose machine and occupy a lot more of its resources. But you still have that full-sized, hog of an old desktop tower now sitting in a 19 inch rack, generating heat and sucking up too much power. Now it’s time to scale down the computer again and that’s where Tilera comes in with it’s multi-core, low power, mesh-networked cpus. And investment partners are rolling in as a result of the promise for this new approach!

    Numerous potential customers, venture capital outfits, and even fabrication partners are jumping in to provide a round of funding that wasn’t even really being solicited by the company. Tilera just had people falling all over themselves writing checks to get a piece of the pie before things take off. It’s a good sign in these stagnant times for startup companies. And hopefully this will buy more time for the roadmap to future cpus from the company hopefully scaling up to the 200 core cpu that would be peak achievement in this quest for high performance, low-power computing.

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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.”