Showing posts with label ARM Software. Show all posts
Packet.net strong-ARMs cloud for $0.005 per core per hour
CEO
Zachary Smith told The Register that the company's cooked up the cloud for a
few reasons. Price is one: Packet will offer ARM cores at a tenth of the price
it charges for Intel cores, at US$0.50 per hour per server, or $0.005 per core
per hour. Smith thinks that will be a head-turner by itself.
Packet.net,
a bare-metal cloud aimed at developers, has flicked the switch on cloud-running
servers powered by a pair of Cavium's 48-core ARMv8-A ThunderX processors.
He
also thinks developers will appreciate the chance to try native Docker on
many-cored machines and appreciate the opportunity an ARM-powered cloud
represents as they pursue 100 per cent portable software. He believes open
source folk will see the arrival of an ARM-powered cloud as incentive to
accelerate cross-platform versions of their pet projects.
Even
ARM will benefit, he says, because having a working cloud on the market will
give both it and licensees more reason to innovate for the data centre.
ARM's
recent purchaser, SoftBank, recently tipped some money into Packet.net, but Smith
swears he's had a long-term ambition to offer an ARM-powered cloud, if only
because he enjoys having multiple ARM server CPU vendors willing to do deals.
That kind of competition is not currently possible in the x86 world, at least
until AMD returns to servers in 2017.
Smith
also feels that ARM clouds are inevitable, probably thanks to telcos looking to
offer cores to rent at the edge of their networks. The CEO feels that telcos
will build edge clouds because they're sick of over-the-top players having all
the fun and profits: this time telcos want to build a revenue-generating
platform beyond mere carriage.
For
now, Packet's ARM cloud offers 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04, but promises that CoreOS,
FreeBSD and CentOS are in the pipeline. Four different ARM server
configurations are also in the works.
The
cloud will have an API, a portal, and will also be accessible from DevOps
favourites likes Terraform and Ansible. Four of the company's bit barns – in
Parsippany New Jersey, Sunnyvale California, Amsterdam and Tokyo – will offer
the service as of Tuesday.
"We
want to offer a super-cheap, 'you would be stupid not to try it'
offering," Smith told The Register. "If we can get the open source
ecosystem rebooted, I think Intel's grip on the data centre will be
shattered." ®
New Cavium ThunderX2 adopts 64-bit ARM-based servers to address application and workload requirements
Semiconductor
vendor Cavium announced Monday ThunderX2, its second generation of workload
optimized ARM server SoCs that targets high performance volume servers deployed
by public/private cloud and telecom communications data centers and high
performance computing applications. It is optimized for data center workloads
such as compute, security, storage, data analytics, network function
virtualization and distributed databases.
The ThunderX2 line of processors currently includes four workload optimized processors targeting different workloads.
The ThunderX2_CP has been optimized for cloud compute workloads such as private and public clouds, web serving, web caching, web search, commercial HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modeling. This line supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network Interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. It also includes accelerators for virtualization and vSwitch offload.
The ThunderX2_ST has been optimized for big data, cloud storage, massively parallel processing (MPP) databases and Data warehousing workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network interfaces, PCIe Gen3 interfaces and SATAv3 interfaces. It also includes hardware accelerators for data protection/ integrity/security, user to user efficient data movement.
The ThunderX2_SC has been optimized for secure web front-end, security appliances and cloud RAN type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. Integrated hardware accelerators include Cavium’s industry leading, 5th generation NITROX security technology with acceleration for IPSec, RSA and SSL.
The ThunderX2_NT has been optimized for media servers, scale-out embedded applications and NFV type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces. It also includes OCTEON style hardware accelerators for packet parsing, shaping, lookup, QoS and forwarding.
“The Cavium ThunderX2 will expand the market opportunity for ARM-based server technologies by addressing demanding application and workload requirements for compute, storage networking and security,” said Simon Segars, CEO, ARM. “ThunderX2 demonstrates Cavium’s ability to deliver a combination of innovation and engineering execution and the new product family increases the momentum for server deployments powered by ARM processors in large scale data centers and end user environments.”
Cavium’s ThunderX2 SoC line 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 an array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its position in the open source software community driving upstream kernel enablement for ThunderX, actively contributing to Linaro’s enterprise and networking groups, investing in Linux Foundation projects such as Xen and OPNFV and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s ARMv8 server implementation.
ThunderX2 will deliver two to three times the performance across a range of standard benchmarks and applications compared to ThunderX, while boosting the market reach of the ThunderX line of processors by targeting applications that require high single thread performance such as web search, graph analytics, a variety of enterprise applications such as massively parallel processing (MPP) databases, data warehousing and enterprise HPC applications such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modelling. ThunderX2 will deliver comparable performance at a better total cost of ownership compared to the next generation of traditional server processors.
The ThunderX2 line of processors currently includes four workload optimized processors targeting different workloads.
The ThunderX2_CP has been optimized for cloud compute workloads such as private and public clouds, web serving, web caching, web search, commercial HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modeling. This line supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network Interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. It also includes accelerators for virtualization and vSwitch offload.
The ThunderX2_ST has been optimized for big data, cloud storage, massively parallel processing (MPP) databases and Data warehousing workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network interfaces, PCIe Gen3 interfaces and SATAv3 interfaces. It also includes hardware accelerators for data protection/ integrity/security, user to user efficient data movement.
The ThunderX2_SC has been optimized for secure web front-end, security appliances and cloud RAN type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. Integrated hardware accelerators include Cavium’s industry leading, 5th generation NITROX security technology with acceleration for IPSec, RSA and SSL.
The ThunderX2_NT has been optimized for media servers, scale-out embedded applications and NFV type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces. It also includes OCTEON style hardware accelerators for packet parsing, shaping, lookup, QoS and forwarding.
“The Cavium ThunderX2 will expand the market opportunity for ARM-based server technologies by addressing demanding application and workload requirements for compute, storage networking and security,” said Simon Segars, CEO, ARM. “ThunderX2 demonstrates Cavium’s ability to deliver a combination of innovation and engineering execution and the new product family increases the momentum for server deployments powered by ARM processors in large scale data centers and end user environments.”
Cavium’s ThunderX2 SoC line 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 an array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its position in the open source software community driving upstream kernel enablement for ThunderX, actively contributing to Linaro’s enterprise and networking groups, investing in Linux Foundation projects such as Xen and OPNFV and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s ARMv8 server implementation.
ThunderX2 will deliver two to three times the performance across a range of standard benchmarks and applications compared to ThunderX, while boosting the market reach of the ThunderX line of processors by targeting applications that require high single thread performance such as web search, graph analytics, a variety of enterprise applications such as massively parallel processing (MPP) databases, data warehousing and enterprise HPC applications such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modelling. ThunderX2 will deliver comparable performance at a better total cost of ownership compared to the next generation of traditional server processors.
Several
months ago we had pre-release benchmarks of the Cavium ThunderX. The company
promptly contacted us and wanted to show what its hardware can do. Those
benchmarks were done on an older OS with older software. Over the past few
weeks we have been working with both the single and dual socket (48 core and 96
core) variants of the Cavium ThunderX part and what struck us is how fast the
software side is maturing in key areas. We will have more in-depth benchmarks
of the platforms running real world workloads soon.
Prior
to the release of the Cavium ThunderX most 64-bit ARM development, even for
server applications, has been done on low price ARM development boards. There
the typical core and memory count is both fixed and low. Networking is often
provided by a USB to Ethernet adapter. This is a scene of typical ARM
development hardware to date at many Silicon Valley startups:
While that is great for IoT development, the Cavium ThunderX platform is completely different. There are both single and dual processor configurations scaling up to 96 64-bit ARM cores. Memory capacities can scale into the TB range, or about 1000x a typical IoT development board. Networking provided on our test platforms is 80Gbps for our single processor system and 160Gbps on our dual processor system. Onboard storage can support more than a dozen SSDs or hard drives. Here is what our dual Cavium ThunderX 96 core test platform (a Gigabyte R270-T61) looks like inside:
The
bottom line is, if you are developing for ARM in the data center, you need to
get a Cavium ThunderX platform as it is the best data center ARM platform
generally available today. In the remainder of this article, we are going to
show how some benchmarks around the evolving software and development
ecosystems. These benchmarks will show how the Cavium ThunderX is a competitive
server platform. With a few weeks of working with the hardware/ software, and
given the fact we manage both lab and production servers with Ubuntu, we are
going to share some anecdotal experiences as well.
The
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Update
We
originally received our single Cavium ThunderX 48 core system Gigabyte R120-T30
that we reviewed here. It had Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pre-installed from Cavium. After
poking around with the machine running in our data center, there were a few
nuances to the setup and ARM platforms:
- - Using
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS required quite a bit of patching to get great performance
- - Trying
to pull working software via “apt-get install” if it resided in universe
did not always work. Sometimes packages were just not present. Those that
did install were not optimized.
- - As Cavium pointed out, using newer gcc versions and building applications from the latest source was often the way to get good performance out of ARM platforms.
We
updated the 1S ThunderX platform to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS the same week we received
the 2S ThunderX platform in our data center. It was immediately clear that the
experience was much better. Software that required patching instead worked out
of the box. Packages installed from repos almost every time with even many
multiverse packages working without having to custom compile software. This was
a completely different experience.
The update had two implications. First, unlike Ubuntu 14.04 LTS,
16.04 LTS felt more like it just worked. Second, out of box performance was
much better than in 14.04.
