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Baserock Slab Server Pairs High-Density ARM Chips With Linux

Posted by timothy on from the no-need-only-lust dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes with a report at Slash Datacenter that a portion of the predicted low-power-ARM-servers future has arrived, in the form of Codethink's Baserock Slab ARM Server, which puts 32 cores into a half-depth 1U server. "As with other servers built on ARM architecture, Codethink intends the Baserock Slab for data centers in need of extra power efficiency. The Slab supports Baserock Linux, currently in its second development release (known as 'Secret Volcano'), as well as Debian GNU/Linux. While Baserock Linux was first developed around the X86-64 platform, its developers planned the leap to the ARM platform. Each Slab CPU node consists of a Marvell quad-core 1.33-GHz Armada XP ARM chip, 2 GB of ECC RAM, a Cogent Computer Systems CSB1726 SoM, and a 30 GB solid-state drive. The nodes are connected to the high-speed network fabric, which includes two links per compute node driving 5 Gbits/s of bonded bandwidth to each CPU, with wire-speed switching and routing at up to 119 million packets per second."

12 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Slashvertisment by daniel23 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The summary is almost unreadable, too

    --
    605413? Yes, it's a prime.
    1. Re:Slashvertisment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Only slashdot can make "bi" posts uninteresting.

  2. As usual the key information is missing by godrik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The main question is how much GFlop per watt you get out of it, or the number of transactions per watt. Saying it is ARM so it is energy efficient is as stupid as saying it is pink so it is pretty.

    Some application are best processed (energy wise) by using a kick ass power hungry GPU. Who cares if you consume a lot of electricity if you have a tremendous throughput?

    1. Re:As usual the key information is missing by hattig · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Total data centre power consumption is a major problem. We have the space in the racks for more servers, but no more power. In that case getting (example figures) 50% of the CPU power at 25% of the power consumption is totally worth it.

      The problem for these ARM servers is whether a 64-core cluster in 150W beats a quad-core low-power x86 server in 150W. "Beating" in this situation means either performance, cost or both.

    2. Re:As usual the key information is missing by exabrial · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sorry, I was wrong. Current generation CortexA9 processors support up to 4gb _per process_ using some virtualization tricks. Cortex A15 has 40bit addressing, supporting up 1TB of ram per process. A15 processors are just being released right now...

    3. Re:As usual the key information is missing by nullchar · · Score: 3, Insightful
      From the fine "article":

      Typical ARM cores consume just a fraction of the power of an X86-based server. While Codethink hasn’t outright disclosed the actual power needs of the Slab, its 260-watt power supply offers something of a clue. Meanwhile, the forward-compatible SOMs (server object managers) will allow operators to replace the CPUs with newer models.

      First, it's like the GP said, "it's ARM therefore it's low power" without giving any specifications. To market this, it seems like they would really need tested specs from a decent benchmark tool.

      Finally, to praise the quality of the "article", I thought "SoM" meant System on Module. A "server object manager" sounds like something running inside a java virtual machine.

      I don't understand how Geek.net thinks attaching poor quality blog posts (they're not really articles) to the Slashdot brand will help them... Slashdotters see through those BI/Cloud//DataCenter posts every time.

  3. My bleeding eyes... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    I seriously hope that the mechanical design isn't as nasty as the rendering makes it look...

    So, we've got a 260watt PSU in a half-depth 1-U. By my count, there are nine of those weedy little low-profile fans that start buzzing on cheap GPUs after about a week, plus one blower and a 40mm fan in the PSU. Also, there are air intake/exhaust slits on the front and rear of the case(which could be a problem since the manufacturer recommends mounting them back-to-back to achieve full rack density...); but none on the sides and (as best one can tell from the rendering) no obvious flow path from intake to exhaust, just a lot of churn.

    I can only hope that this is a low volume product, for which doing actual case design was uneconomic...

    1. Re:My bleeding eyes... by hamjudo · · Score: 2

      It is less than half depth. There is a gap for hot air between the front and back units. In the pictures and animation on the Baserock site there are more ventilation slots. It appears that the air enters each through the front and both sides, and exits through the back. This will produce a chimney of heat in the center of each rack.

    2. Re:My bleeding eyes... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Interesting

      actually, got that completely wrong - its a cold chimney, cables and the PSU output is outward-facing. See the video on their site

  4. Re:What workload would actually work with this? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    My guess would be that this is the 'almost as good; but built out of cheap commodity stuff and therefore a lot cheaper' stab at the same niche that Sun was going after with their "T1" and "T2" cores and the T1000 and successor servers based on them. I don't know how well it worked out in practice(obviously not well enough to save Sun; but this was just one product line among others); but the theory was to target certain web and small-database-many-users workloads that tended to have a large number of computationally(especially floating point) undemanding threads in flight at a time.

    The Sun version had the advantages of being a single system image, and support for various Big UNIX Vendor goodies(system partitioning and fancy memory error correction, and friends); but I doubt that they had the advantage of costing as little as dinky ARM compute boards do...

  5. Re:Floating point by Desler · · Score: 2

    Cortex-A15 is, according to ARM, supposed to be much, much beefier for floating point and have better NEON performance. Plus with 40-bit physical addressing it could be quite an impressive competitor.

  6. Re:Woz Thinks Clouds Are Uncool, but... by fm6 · · Score: 2

    You have a very strange idea of how mobile apps work.