[HH] Adapteva's Epiphany

[Kurt Keville]

We will have the HP Redstone server (part of Project 
Moonshot)  described as part of this lecture series as well so feel 
free to check it out Friday...

http://meegs.mit.edu/

note that the Raspberry Pi Lecture has been moved to Friday as 
well... but we are still having speakers at the Wed. event...



>High density, low power data center servers is another possibility, like
>HP's "Redstone" servers:
>
>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_servers/
>
>   ...server cluster that makes use of the EnergyCore ARM RISC server
>   chip just announced by upstart Calxeda.
>
>   The hyperscale server effort is known as Project Moonshot, and the
>   first server platform to be created under the project is known as
>   Redstone...
>
>   The ECX-1000 processors that are the first in the EnergyCore products
>   are 32-bit chips that will come in two-core and four-core variants.
>
>   They include memory, I/O, and storage controllers and an embedded
>   Layer 2 switch fabric on the chip, which means you can just wire a 4GB
>   DDR3 memory stick to one, slap on some I/O ports, plug these babies
>   into a passive backplane, and you have interconnected server nodes
>   that take the place of rack servers and top-of-rack switches.
>
>   HP can cram three rows of these ARM boards, with six per row, for a
>   total of 72 server nodes, in a half-width 2U slot, like this [see
>   photo: http://regmedia.co.uk/2011/10/31/hp_redstone_server_tray.jpg ]
>
>   ...you can put four of these trays in the chassis...That gives you 288
>   server nodes in a 4U rack space, or 72 servers per rack unit.
>
>   A more traditional x86-based cluster doing the same amount of work
>   would only require 400 two-socket Xeon servers, but it would take up
>   10 racks of space, have 1,600 cables, burn 91 kilowatts, and cost
>   $3.3m. The big, big caveat is, of course, that you need a workload
>   that can scale well on a modestly clocked (1.1GHz or 1.4GHz),
>   four-core server chip that only thinks in 32-bits and only has 4GB of
>   memory.
>
>
>A blurb on this in Technology Review (where I first heard of it) says
>"Calxeda...claims that its servers draw five watts when operating and
>only half a watt when idle..." That's for a 4-core chip I presume (the
>TR article doesn't specify, but I assume both articles are talking about
>the same chips; and I assume by "server" they meant processor, because
>the latter part of the sentence compares it to a "conventional server
>processor that draws 160 watts when operating")), so the Epiphany beats
>it if they can do 16-cores at 2 watts.
>
>  -Tom
>_______________________________________________
>Hardwarehacking mailing list
>Hardwarehacking at blu.org
>http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking