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SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
- stcredzero 16y agoThe way I read this, they are achieving savings by virtually mux-ing (or de-muxing depending on viewpoint) much of everything that's not the CPU. Is this optimized to make the support of virtual servers with relatively low throughput more efficient?
- njharman 16y agoI read it to be they created a chip that runs code written to emulate/virtualize most of the other (non-cpu) logic on a motherboard. so instead of 10 "io" chips and 10 "memory" chips most of which are idle they have 15 virt chips which may act as either "io" or "memory" depending on demand. I guess (de)muxing is close to that? Multiplexing many "request" amongst fewer real(non-virutal) objects.
- stcredzero 16y agoI read it to be they created a chip that runs code written to emulate/virtualize most of the other (non-cpu) logic on a motherboard. That's exactly what I meant by "virtually (de)muxing everything but the CPU." I should have said, "CPU+chipset," though. I wonder if their architecture is also (unintentionally) optimized for languages like Ruby/Python? I suspect that languages like those tend to have more CPU operations per IO operation. I wonder if anyone has researched this metric?
- hga 16y agoWell, they're only muxing IO; each Atom CPU has a chipset CPU and it's own DRAM (up to 2GB (the Atom has a hard 4GB limit), no ECC since Intel only offers that for official server chips).
- GFischer 16y agoInteresting... I've never been in a really big datacenter, so I'd like to see some (hopefully non-biased) reviews from somebody that does work in those places. Would this really work well for the intended market? There are lots of startups over here that plan on massively serving webpages - would something like this (only cheaper :) ) make you reconsider using whatever cloud services you're currently using? Articles I found on Google: http://gigaom.com/2010/06/13/seamicros-low-power-server-finally-launches/ http://gigaom.com/2010/06/13/seamicros-low-power-server-fina... and the Wall Street Journal's take: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/06/14/seamicro-tries-to-rethink-the-internet-server/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/06/14/seamicro-tries-to-ret...
- stcredzero 16y agoThere are lots of startups over here that plan on massively serving webpages Seamicro is using the same sort of lateral move that RISC made and that Transmeta attempted to apply: Could certain functions happen more efficiently if moved outside of the traditional 'box?' Could a datacenter provide a low-latency infrastructure for front-end web-servers while reducing their power and other expenses? I think there's a good chance this is already being done.
- lsc 16y agowhat I see right now is that people are choosing fewer, higher speed, more expensive and more power hungry cores over more, slower, cheaper and more efficient cores. Anyone who uses Xeons instead of the new 8 or 12 core opterons has made this choice. Sure, the Xeons kick ass when it comes to single threaded performance, but as far as performance per watt or performance per dollar go, the new socket G34 opterons kick the shit out of the Xeons. For the cost of an 8 core Xeon, I can get a low power 8 core opteron, 32GiB ram, and a nice SuperServer to put it all in.
- Andys 16y agoIts a custom-designed niche product. It will be priced accordingly. You can tell from their "dollar savings" chart that they plan to claw back the money you save in price of the machine!
- p3ll0n 16y agoJames Hamilton, VP at Amazon and author of the popular blog "Perspectives" has some interesting insights into and great things to say about the work SeaMicro and other new startups are doing to revolutionize the server industry. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleasesInnovativeIntelAtomServer.aspx http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleases...
- ableal 16y ago(timf had submitted that one too, but it slipped down) Another write-up with names and tech details here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/14/seamicro_sm10000_server/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/14/seamicro_sm10000_ser...
- hga 16y agoSee http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1429625 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1429625 for HN item on this excellent posting of his with a few comments, e.g. I note he notes this system has no ECC. And that Intel is pretty unique in that limitation.
- astrodust 16y agoI hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.
- wenbert 16y agoHopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.
- lsc 16y agoHey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.
- alextp 16y agoYou can search for local linux/debian user groups.
- lsc 16y agoyeah, that's the sort of thing I'm looking for... but often it's hard to tell from the webpages which ones are popular, and which ones are just two guys. Hm. But yeah, I should play more with LUGs in poor parts of the world; I've tried to give away stuff to local LUGs around here (in the SF bay area) but they usually have a setup they like already, and other providers falling over themselves to give them free crap.
- mlni 16y agoWhy not just buy google ads for technical keywords and target only the desired countries?
- Super74 16y agoBig surprise, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM not innovating? I can't believe it... Just look at the computers they are selling. most still offers 512M of RAM as a default. What can you run on 512? Nothing like having to upgrade the day you receive your product. Consumers by and large need the guidance of manufacturers to make the right HW choices and the manufacturers just want the cash. They will suck each segment dry until the market forces them to make the changes. That's progress? With all the advances in multi-monitor add-on SW or the fact that Windows and Mac OS have been supporting multi-monitor control for years, try finding hardware already fitted with multiple display connections. In the end, the user is forced to customize their own equipment. And yes, I know most HN readers do this, but I am talking about the general public. Great to see the little guys are still fighting. The big ones really don't give a damn.
- rbanffy 16y ago> What the F* can you run on 512? A lot, really. I have rendered DVD quality movies, handled product composition databases and processed millions of orders on machines with less than 512 megs of memory. Not many companies (or people) have enough data or volume to stress a machine with 512 megs of RAM. I agree it seems a pittance - my netbook has more than that - but if I break up memory usage by application here, Firefox takes most of the RAM, then Gwibber, then Rhythmbox. None of them would be running on a server. It would be interesting to write down a list of what you can't do with 512M.
- Super74 16y agoWell, you can't effectively run Mac OS X or W7 on 512 to start, the most used operating systems in the world. Even Ubuntu needs an upgraded graphics card and RAM to utilize all of the bells and whistles. As I said before, I was referring to the general public. There will always be hackers or high-end users that can make miracles.
- thedjpetersen 16y agoI run Ubuntu off of 512M of ram, and it has always performed well for me, I don't think it is a miracle to run off that amount of memory, for most people's needs they could deal with a lot less memory. Most people just want more memory for more eye candy.
- wingo 16y agoInteresting article, but a terrible title! Atom bombs, really?
- mattmcknight 16y agoIt would have been better to see a comparison with SGI (ex-Rackable) CloudRack systems, which have a bit of an inbetween approach, using Xeons, but at least nominally seem to pack in more cores in the same enclosure size. One of their power tricks, in addition to pulling back DC converters further from the computers, is to allow things to run hot, resulting in savings on cooling costs.
- Scott_MacGregor 16y agoToo bad the electrical signal on the board cannot be altered in some way to allow less heat production for a given amount of processing. That would be a win-win situation all around. The heat seems like wasted energy, perhaps inefficiency that could be done away with by thinking outside the box.
- Tamerlin 16y agoThe SGI machines are geared pretty heavily toward supercomputing applications. As such they're tailored for applications that need to share data between processes efficiently, and that also need to do a lot of computing. The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors. What would make more sense is a comparison a datacenter for a company like Disney or Google or Amazon. I suspect that even though SeaMicro's rig would look pretty bad for heavy number-crunching apps, it would most likely do very well in web and database. Those apps don't need to share a lot of data between threads/processes, and they're generally I/O bound rather than compute bound. With proper caching setups, they're mostly network bound, rather than disk bound also.
- mattmcknight 16y agoI was thinking of the Rackable stuff, not the supercomputing stuff. They actually acquired SGI, but took the SGI name. http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/april/rackable.html http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...
- pornel 16y agoTheir tech overview PDF has less layman fluff than the article: http://dev.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/SeaMicroTechOverview.pdf http://dev.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/SeaMicroTechOver...
- hackermom 16y agoAn ARM-powered variant would sit on top of this Atom-powered machine, with quite possibly the same or higher numbers of efficiency when looking at performance-per-watt. The article quotes the interviewee saying that ARMs can be used, but not clear enough to determine if they actually have ARM versions of these machines, which I'd be very interested in seeing 100k specint_rate figures for.
- pjscott 16y agoMost of their technology is not related to the processors themselves, but to the rest of the computer. They've got a fancy high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect between the chips. They multiplex access to I/O hardware, which I'm sure takes advantage of that nice interconnect. They have hardware-accelerated network load balancing which tries to keep the CPUs at maximally-efficient levels of utilization, letting the spare CPUs sleep, and avoiding malfunctioning CPUs. I would love to see this with ARM Cortex-A9 processors, and I think that's actually very likely if this company succeeds.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y agoI am completely baffled that Intel did not do this. I guess they figured ATOM is just a crappy little side-project processor, not one of the big boys.
- megaman821 16y agoThey basically did it's called Larrabee and it is now being transformed into a server product.
- pjscott 16y agoIt looks to me like Larrabee's successor is is going after the high-performance computing market, not the server market. Why else would they devote so much die area to having loads of wide floating-point SIMD units?
- ippisl 16y agoSome see the move to many-core ATOM servers , as a move to put financial pressure on intel(since ATOMs are cheap). And this move helps the future of ARM based servers , since ARM is more similar to ATOM than to XEON.
- hga 16y agoThere's going to be limits to the amount of pressure as long as Intel doesn't offer ECC for any Atom variety microarchitecture. One of the articles I read said that they thought about using an AMD chip but it wasn't going to ship soon enough. I can see them hearing from their customers (would be and actual) that they'd buy more if they offered ECC and SeaMicro offering an AMD based box in the future. I wonder how Atom specific the ASIC is....
- ippisl 16y agoi think that the chip also suits the ARM architecture without changes.
- Scott_MacGregor 16y agoGreat news! Hardware innovation typically means new software opportunities. If this is turns out to be a generally accepted workhorse server design and not just a hotrod box I wonder who will be the first in here to develop a profitable software product for it. Dell products have features and services that make them enterprise friendly, they are more than just hardware to the customer. So trying to compete with Dell head on might not be the company's best strategy at first. Perhaps following the strategy EMC used with CLARiiON to sell through DELL would be more of a money maker for the company.
- patrickgzill 16y agoInteresting in terms of technology, but of no interest to me as someone who does colocation and web servers for my clients, especially since they almost all use traditional RDBMSes like MySQL and Postgres. The Atom is too underpowered and too RAM limited for individual systems - you would do better in most cases with a 2x quadcore setup and 32-64GB RAM combined with OpenVZ or Solaris Zones. Lack of ECC = automatic disqualification for me as well. For a company that is doing a lot of web serving a la Facebook or eBay I can definitely see the appeal. In such larger cases, power usage dwarfs many other considerations.
- arvinjoar 16y agoI would rethink that if I were you. What if you started to provide virtual private servers on one of these boxes instead of offering colocation? I think this innovation makes VPS solutions even more efficient than they are today.
- lsc 16y agoECC is a huge thing in that case. The thing about being a VPS provider is that if your hardware chokes, your customers notice, and they get pissed. Sure, if you are running some kind of web farm you set it up so that things keep running without interruption if you lose a server. But if you provide VPS hosting and you lose a server? People notice, and they will be pissed. If you are a VPS provider and you loose customer data? they will parade your severed head around town on the end of a pike. Amazon has successfully tackled this problem by training their customers that they can shoot a server at any time. This is good for them, but it's not how VPSs have traditionally operated. customers expect the thing to stay up and for their data to stay safe.
- bnoordhuis 16y agoI've seen ECC mentioned a few times in this thread but how relevant is it really? At my old job we used both regular COTS hardware from Dell and HP and high-performance gear from SUN, often at four times the price. The latter had ECC memory and, if memory serves, shielded CPUs but I never noticed much difference in stability or performance when compared to regular hardware. If someone has some numbers on this, I'd love to see them.
- surlyadopter 16y agoWith that many processors crammed into such a small case isn't heat dissipation a problem? Or are the Atom chips used not as power hungry as a standard commercial cpu?
- flogic 16y agoAtoms are low on power usage. Hence their popularity for net books.
- jonknee 16y ago"Atom chips used not as power hungry as a standard commercial cpu" is quite literally the entire point of this startup/product and the article. You had to quit reading before the second sentence to miss this: > The startup is announcing today it has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.
- c00p3r 16y agoThere are no information about the chipset, memory specs and extension slots in particular. It could be a huge bottleneck between CPUs and RAM, because of concurrent access of so many CPUs to the memory while Atoms have a very small caches. It means that real-world applications, like a multi-threaded services (especially JVM-based, or simply MySQL) could not be used efficiently. I'm also very skeptical about hundreds of KVMs which is a the only working virtualization technology I know. =)
- hga 16y agoHere's a lot more technical detail: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3768/seamicro-announces-sm10000-server-with-512-atom-cpus-and-low-power-consumption/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/3768/seamicro-announces-sm1000... Per CPU (8 per board): Atom Z530 (1.6GHz, Silverthorne) US15 chipset (Poulsbo) 2GB DDR2 Per board: 4 ASICs to virtualize IO 2x PCIe x16 connectors "Each hop takes 8 microseconds", so good enough for (most/all?) IO but not good enough for memory. No ECC of course, it being a non-server Intel chip. Each single cored CPU has its own DIMM. * * * * EDITED to clarify the layout per CPU and per board after c00p3r made it clear I wasn't being clear. * * * *
- c00p3r 16y agoSo, it's just a tight packing of a 512 netbook's boards in a one box. I thought it is a 512-core system. Oh, I'm such a moron. Nothing to see here.
- hga 16y agoNo, no: each board has 8 CPU/chipet/DIMM(s?) (latter on the other side of the board) with 4 ASICs each handing all the rest of a motherboard's IO, virtualizing it (e.g. each core sees 4 virtual SATA drives). That's why each board needs 2 x16 PCIe connections, the backplane has a fancy supercomputer style torus topology interconnect, and you can put up to 64 physical disks in front. Lots of Ethernet out the back and there's an FPGA system for the backplane, which might be due to the small number of units but will give them lots of flexibility.
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- zokier 16y agohttp://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/b/direct2dell/archive/2009/05/19/dell-launches-quot-fortuna-quot-via-nano-based-server-for-hyperscale-customers.aspx http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/b/direct2dell/archiv... Similar concept from Dell, from over a year ago. Although Fortuna seems bit more conventional, I'm not sure if it's a bad thing.
- limist 16y ago"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...
- c00p3r 16y ago"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay Where are Sun, SGI, Cray, etc now?
- mbreese 16y agoIs Apple just an anomaly? Also, Sun was bought partially so that Oracle could offer a complete software/hardware package, so I'm not sure your point stands. The others had great runs with great hardware/software... they just didn't survive to the next generation.
- ComputerGuru 16y agoAnd you can add Google and Microsoft to that list, too.
- wvenable 16y agoApple, Google, and Microsoft don't build all their own hardware -- not in the same sense as Sun, SGI, and Cray. Apple uses Intel and ARM chips (even the A4 is a Cortex A8 with a PowerVR SGX). Apple is builds the best cases for their hardware, but the hardware is all pretty standard.
- dharmatech 16y agoThe Cray Jaguar is the fastest on the TOP500. I'm actually in Chippewa Falls at the moment. :-)
- WilliamLP 16y agoI think I can afford to wait until people start proving undeniably (through out-competing rivals) that Scala and Clojure have any pragmatic benefit in real multicore programming tasks. Anything that mentions Fibonacci numbers doesn't count, nor do easily parallelizable problems commonly handled in C/C++ (ray tracing, media encoding, web servers, etc.) It needs to be something not trivially broken up into independent parts.
- xtacy 16y agoThis seems quite similar to the FAWN project at CMU. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/ The idea is similar: if IO is the bottleneck, instead of scaling up IO, scale down the CPU power.
- CountHackulus 16y agoI do see a potential problem here. In the pictures, they show a bunch of Atom CPUs soldered directly to the board. That means dire things for service. Now, if a single CPU has a a flaw, you need to replace an entire board of CPUs. Compare this to a standard blade setup, where you could just swap out CPUs, or even an IBM System Z where you could hotswap the CPU, and service doesn't look so great.
- gfodor 16y agoYou're certainly jumping to a lot of conclusions here, perhaps the boards of CPUs are quite cheap?
- hga 16y agoOr just ignore it if it doesn't take out the whole card. Atoms only come this way (solder mount), right? You can hotswap each 8 CPU board.
- wmf 16y agoTo be fair, the unit of hotswap in System z is a book that contains ~32 cores; that's not so different from SeaMicro.
- pjscott 16y agoThe load-balancer monitors the health of the processors and can route around broken ones. Some amount of degradation is okay.
- DEinspanjer 16y agoI worked with one of these prototype boxes. I was using it for something a bit outside their common use case: clustered ETL processing of log data. I was quite happy with the performance. In the workloads I had that needed lots of threads, I was able to use the box to spin up a lot of nodes and crunch through several hundred GB of log data very quickly. The machines were easy to work with since they felt like normal Linux nodes, and the interconnect fabric made inter-process communication very snappy.
- runT1ME 16y agoI'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine, or is it a 'cluster' in the sense that each node has a single processor? (You used both threads and inter-process, but also implied multiple nodes...)
- blhack 16y ago>I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine I would love to watch that thing boot, haha. SO many penguins!
- blhack 16y agoI apologize for the self-reply, but am I wrong here? I use mostly OpenBSD and linux only lives on servers that I don't physically see booting. I remember when I first starting using Linux, there would be one penguin for each processor core. Booting it up for the first time on a dual xeon machine and seeing 8 of them, was kindof funny in a nerdy way. Would this be different? If there are 512 cores...would it show a penguin for each core? Sorry, like I said, I haven't actually watched the boot process on a linux machine for quite some time, and now I'm a bit curious... Sorry if this question is juvenile or stupid or something.
- koenigdavidmj 16y agoMost likely it would be an 80x25 text console, no framebuffer in sight. Maybe even a serial console.
- pjscott 16y agoPerformance per watt depends on the computer and the workload. It's not apparent from the SPECint benchmarks they show in the article, but chips like Atom are better than beefy server chips for some server workloads, and worse for others, when measuring performance per watt. Here's a paper from Berkeley's RAD lab which tries two Atom processors and a Xeon on several different server workloads, and compares their performance per watt: http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/hotpower_10_chun.pdf http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/hotpower_10_chun.pd... The tl;dr version is that what you really want are hybrid datacenters, where you can assign various workloads to different types of machines, and use each machine type for what it's best suited to do.
- ssp 16y agoSee also this: http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT090909050230 http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT090909050... for a comparison of various types of chips.
- pjscott 16y agoThat chart compares theoretical peak GFLOPS per watt, which is an absolutely terrible metric for server workloads. As the paper I linked to showed, Atom is sometimes much better and sometimes much worse than large, fast server processors in performance per watt on real server workloads. Those charts don't take into account things like cache, or branch prediction, or multicore memory coherence. The only way to get meaningful performance per watt data is to actually run real workloads on various processors.
- ericd 16y agoYeah, there are still some single-threaded tasks that I want my servers to be able to tear through. For serving up HTTP requests, though, this sounds great.
- 10ren 16y agoI would think that ARM chips would use less power than Atom; but compatibility with existing software is a big selling point (as always). But this would provide a pressure towards ARM servers, and therefore ARM-compatible software. OTOH, I get the impression that the bulk of the power savings are not from the CPU at all, but from virtualizing the other components. Therefore, the pressure towards ARM is much less. And I suppose Intel wouldn't be supportive unless there was a compelling long-term reason to choose Atom.
- rythie 16y agoDoes this really solve a problem anyone has though? It seems we have an oversupply of CPU on modern boxes and an under supply of I/O speed (or space with SSDs) and memory.
- jobeirne 16y agoWhere can I invest?
- sh1mmer 16y agoAnyone care to suggest some ideas on a few things: a) who would likely buy these (corporates, SMEs, startups)? b) it seems that they have increased the risk of single point of failure (e.g. 1 PSU taking down 128 nodes) what's the mitigation strategy? c) what would an architecture on a box like this look like? Should I just be thinking of it as a cheap set of VPS nodes? d) People keep mentioning the kind of processing these chips are good for and not so good for. Can someone be explicit about good real world uses and bad ones?
- hga 16y agoI suspect a lot if not most of their customers will be buying more than one, so that mitigates the PSU problem.
- wmf 16y agoa) Web 2.0 sites. b) It has four redundant power supplies, as do all systems of this size. c) It's a Beowulf cluster. d) See the FAWN, Amdahl blade, Gordon, and CEMS papers.