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HP Announces ARM-Based Server Line
sammcj writes with news that HP is developing servers based on 32-bit ARM processors from Calxeda. Their current model is only a test setup, but they plan to roll out a finalized design by the middle of next year.
"HP's server design packs 288 Calxeda chips into a 4U rack-mount server, or 2,800 in a full rack, with a shared power, cooling, and management infrastructure. By eliminating much of the cabling and switching devices used in traditional servers and using the low-power ARM processors, HP says it can reduce both power and space requirements dramatically. The Redstone platform uses a 4U (7-inch) rack-mount server chassis. Inside, HP has put 72 small server boards, each with four Calxeda processors, 4GB of RAM and 4MB of L2 cache. Each processor, based on the ARM Cortex-A9 design, runs at 1.4GHz and has its own 80 gigabit cross-bar switch built into the chip"
Make your own Beowulf cluster joke here.
Where do the jokes about buying them on eBay go?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
well, x86 arch. is becoming more and more of a drag on computing industry's advances,
_any_ CISC CPU design eats up way more transistors and power than RISC based arch.,
and while it's obvious to most, yet the whole windows/x86-compatibility baggage still keeps this
power-hungry x86 mammoth alive..
those good old days of hand-crafted human-friendly x86 assembly coding are long over,
wake up Intel and Microsoft, put a nice tombstone on x86 and move on
Come on, guys, it's 2011. We're talking servers here. Forget SATA; throw in native iSCSI support (or fibre channel, but iSCSI would probably be significantly easier - if only because it uses standard Ethernet ports, rather than needing extra protocol support), and you'll have something that's a serious contendor in that space.
Think about it: with SATA, you have a bunch of hard disks, probably mostly disused, almost all of them performing atrociously (SATA is notorious for only being good with large sequential I/O). With iSCSI, you can hook up any disk array you damn well want, whatever its performance characteristics. Throw 10 Gb ethernet into the mix, and you have a winner (an expensive winner when you factor in the switch ports, but at least it gives the architect the option.)
I don't think Intel is going to be happy with that announcement. Anyway, we will have to wait since ARM-15 (late 2012) that has hardware virtualization and 64 bits to really see if ARM can compete with Intel.
Let's count - they have Xeon/Opteron, Itanium, and among their dead platforms, they have PA-RISC, Alpha (DEC/Compaq) and MIPS (Tandem/Compaq). What made them pick this for servers?
Would one be right in guessing that their Itanium based Integrity servers have been a disaster?
What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?
HP stopped selling PA-RISC in 2008 and will end support at the end of 2013.
Then make a Minecraft one about Redstone.
With the world moving to 64 bits to accomodate huge databases in memory and on disk they must be aiming for low hanging fruit here. Still, I'd like to get hold of one IF they ever convert it into a desktop version - would be nice to have a linux installation at home that doesn't pay homage to wintel in any way.
Are we going back to transputers again, then?
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
This type of setup is already used in Most DSLAMs. Full rack, 2PSU, cooliing, 24 or 48 port (x)DSL cards with ARM CPU as independent servers, Internal management card and network switch. Think of blade server racks.
Léa Gris
Those processors run at only about 1.1 GHz, and ARM isn't quite as snappy on a "per GHz" basis as a typical Intel core because of the power-vs-speed tradeoff, so I figure that a 1.1 GHz ARM quad-core chip has about the same computer power as a single ~3GHz latest generation Intel Xeon core.
They say the can pack 288 quad core ARM processors into 4 rack units (with no disks). For comparison, HP sells blade systems that let you pack in 16 dual-socket blades into 10 rack units. Populate each socket with a 10 core Intel Xeon, and we're talking 320 cores. So for comparison, that's the equivalent of 72 cores per rack unit with ARM, vs 32 with Intel. The memory density is the other way around, with 288 GB per rack unit for ARM, and 614 GB with Intel.
So, if you have a an embarrassingly parallel problem to solve that can fit into 4GB of memory per node, doesn't use much I/O, and can run on Linux, this might be a pretty good idea.
FC/FCoE/iSCSI all deliver much much lower aggregate I/O performance than coordinated use of direct attached storage. Google, Hadoop, GPFS, Lustre all facilitate that sort of usage. You will in any of those remote disk architecture have an I/O bottleneck along the line.
That said, I would presume netboot at least would be there, and from there you can do iSCSI in software certainly. FCoE tends to be a bit pickier, so they may not be able to do that in the network fabric provided.
On the whole, I'm skeptical still yet. So far ARM has proved itself when low power is critical and performance. I'm not sure if performance per watt is going to be impressive (e.g. if it hypothetically takes 10% of the power of a competitor and gave 9% of the performance, that can work well for places like cell phones but perhaps not so much for a datacenter). ARMv8 may make things very interesting though...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This looks to me to be similar to Bluegene supercomputers. A Bluegene essentially consists of packaged PowerPC processors with a scalable high-performance switch interface on board. The two first current generation Bluegenes were using 32bit CPUs as well.
Markus
Make a Minecraft themed one and I will find a reason to need it.
ARM presumably has patents on its core technologies, which are good for 15-20 years, and also its chip designs would be covered for at least 10 years, so anything compatible would have to be based on some fairly antiquated stuff.
AFAIK, royalties to ARM are not very high in the first place - even though the company effectively gets royalties from several billion ARM chips, its profits over 3 months are only about £30 million, so it is unlikely that the per chip royalty cost is that high.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
So, HP, are you really going to do this or should I just wait a few weeks and wait for the cancellation announcement?
'Cause recently you guys have been a little wishy-washy...
...because 288 cores ought to be enough for anyone.
Where would this fit in the market? My first thought is things with high number of threads but low compute complexity like web servers or something but Oracle essentially flopped in that arena with their ultrasparc or whatever it was with a bunch of threads. It's possible ARM is very fast but I'm only accustomed to seeing it in set top boxes, phones, and such. My understanding is they're great on power consumption but not so great on compute speed...
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what? didn't they stop selling pcs?
not at 32bit that maxes out at 4gb ram where is ARM 64?
...does it run Android?
We got an enclosure full of Transmeta blades, and the performance just sucked. I could see this MAYBE for a VDI solution for a lot of low-power users, but that's it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What kind of applications would this be used for. The only thing I can think of would be web hosting. Does KVM / Xen even work on ARM?
There wouldn't be any serious enterprise applications that would run on ARM (right now) are there? Java?
This is an example of how badly corporate sites fuck it up (my current employer is a perfectly good example).
The browser tells you which language is preferred - there's no need to hardcode it in a URL. And if they want to switch/override, put it in a fucking cookie.
www.hp.com/products/PRODUCTNUM. WTF is so hard about that?
sas and sata connectors are keyed. sata may be plugged into
sas, but not the other way around.
by the way, it's simply wrong to characterize sata as "dummed down" :-))
sas. they're simply different, and they have different strengths. scsi
is not really a strength. it's 2k pages of standard! (i suppose that's
so anything can go; it's kind of like having no standard at all.