Last week we talked about the upcoming release of Intel’s Xeon E5 processor family. This week, we have some even more important announcements regarding Intel MIC and the strategic direction that Intel is headed regarding high performance computing.
Die shot of 'Aubrey Isle,' the silicon chip included in the Intel MIC 'Knights Ferry' development platform
We hope everyone has thus far had a great start to 2012! To help launch us further into the new year, we are running a special “social servers” campaign through the end of February to help bring everyone together for fantastic savings! The Stellar Deal on our 5017C-MTF 1U Single Xeon E3 “Sandy Bridge” server takes the form of social shopping for servers where a special discount of 20% will be applied if the campaign goal of 50 servers is met. If we reach our campaign goal, everyone gets the deal and benefits! If we don’t meet the goal, you won’t be charged but nobody gets the deal.
This is a continuation of our look at future trends in high performance computing. In part 1 we covered the first five of the top ten trends. In this installment we’ll wrap up with the remaining five.
As we near the end of 2011, we take a moment to reflect on the past year. It’s been a busy year for IT across virtually all verticals, from mobile and search to enterprise servers and cloud computing. When we attended HPC360 a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure to attend a keynote presentation by Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect Research in which he discussed the most important trends in high performance computing (HPC).
HPC is an exciting and growing industry that ICC has been moving into the past couple years. The traditional HPC space revolved around high-end research facilities particularly in science and engineering. However, with each year technological innovations and tailored systems such as our Supermicro GPU Simcluster have brought the realm of HPC closer to reality for many small/medium-sized business and organizations.
In this 2-part series we will look at the top 10 future trends in HPC from Intersect360′s research, coupled with our own analysis and thoughts. No better way for us computer nerds to close the year right? Let’s get started.
There has been a decent amount of chatter on all the media channels over some of Facebook’s efforts to move forward with innovative technology. The other day I wrote about its new “green” European data center based in Sweden. In addition, at the recent Open Compute Project Summit, Facebook announced its intention to contribute to greater standardization at the system level for data center server and hardware equipment. For some, minimizing heat and energy consumption is as high a priority as performance.
A potential competitor to Facebook is emerging in HP, who is launching a new effort Project Moonshot. HP intends to utilize this program to develop:
…a new server development platform, “customer discovery lab” and partner ecosystem brought together with the purpose of reducing the complexity and energy consumption of environments that have thousands of servers along with all the network, storage, power, cooling and management technologies needed to support them.
But Facebook as a player in the world of enterprise IT is a newbie. Data centers are not their primary focus. So while HP may butt heads with them, their real game appears to be Intel.
With tougher economic times, companies are reducing IT budgets but are still finding the need to replace legacy systems. Because of this, claims a Gartner report released earlier this year, many CIOs have turned to cloud computing as a way to save on IT costs.
Cloud computing, for all of its recent publicity, is not new. In the decades before PCs, companies purchased computing resources on mini-mainframes that were accessed through end-user terminals. Cloud computing’s recent re-emergence is a result of companies again considering the cost savings of having someone outside the company handle IT infrastructure and maintenance.
But the companies that have arguably the most to gain from cloud computing, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), are still unconvinced. According to a recent Newtek survey, 48% of small businesses owners do not see a switch to the cloud as a cost-reducing move. Continue reading
Last week, LSI announced their release of “the industry’s first 6Gb/s SAS switch”. The switch offers unique opportunities for cluster managers to improve the architecture of their storage systems.
The value of the SAS switch is its function of transforming a cluster from a NAS (network-attached storage) structure into a DAS (direct-attached storage) structure. With DAS, storage data does not have to be transferred from the SAS protocol to the network protocol (Ethernet or InfiniBand) and back to SAS. The bottleneck of the middle step is eliminated – the LSI switch allows all I/O of data to happen through just the SAS protocol. This is especially useful for clusters which have or plan to upgrade to 6Gb/s RAID controllers – their throughput will be increased when connected to a 6Gb/s switch rather than to a network.
Another advantage of switching to a DAS configuration for a cluster is it migrates the RAID controllers from the storage nodes to the compute nodes. In a NAS cluster, each storage node typically has its own RAID controller which communicates with the compute nodes through a network. In a DAS cluster with a SAS switch, the storage nodes are JBODs (“Just A Bunch Of Drives” – essentially hard drive warehouses without other computing components within their chassis) that are all accessed by RAID controllers located directly inside the compute nodes.
This configuration separates the RAID controllers from the storage drives and centralizes each of them for simpler management and improved performance. Now, as many RAID controllers as the cluster administrator decides can access any quantity of drives on separate JBOD-based storage. The process that allows this kind of interaction is known as SAS zoning and is illustrated in the diagram below:
Diagram showing the DAS configuration of a cluster with a SAS switch, RAID controllers located on the compute nodes, and SAS zoning of the JBOD storage nodes.
For more detailed information about the various uses of the LSI 6Gb/s SAS switch, read their white paper about this product. As storage technology continues to evolve, new solutions such as a DAS cluster configuration with a 6Gb/s SAS switch are helping overcome the various I/O bottlenecks that hamper computing performance.
This week, a team from our company visited a large laboratory located in the Chicago area. IT representatives there told us how a major focus for them has been migrating their computing resources from a model of individual workgroups using separate clusters to a shared private cloud that all research teams in the facility can access for running their jobs. This shift to private clouds for getting the most out of dedicated clusters is a hot topic of conversation in the HPC world.
HPC in the Cloud recently published an article responding to a case study written by Platform Computing about the implementation of a private cloud at the Harvard Medical School. Both are worth a read if you are interested in the challenges encountered by small- and medium-sized life sciences organizations when they try to adopt HPC clusters.
HPC holds much promise for organizations such as the Harvard Medical School. With middleware such as Platform Computing (we are biased, I must admit, since this is what HPC clusters by ICC deploy as well) it is getting easier to operate an HPC cluster with hosts running different operating systems and applications. It used to be that this multiplicity of software on the same cluster would cause extensive compatibility and usability problems, but not so much anymore. End-users in the life sciences (such as medical researchers) are benefiting from computing applications that are productive and easy to use.
So Harvard Medical School, as the HPC in the Cloud article describes, has migrated from an inefficient computing model of unshared individual computers scattered across various laboratories to a centralized private cloud that can be accessed by any of those users and managed as one unit. Simplifying maintenance while maximizing accessibility to HPC resources by medical school staff is most likely going to save money and increase the pace of innovation in the long run.
While this is a hopeful case study that sheds light on how other organizations can pool their computing resources to great effect, challenges remain for spreading this model to other small- and medium-size laboratories and businesses. For one, private medical companies are heavily regulated by the government and their IT infrastructure has to incorporate many time-consuming applications to store detailed records.
HPC is becoming more affordable and easier to use, but software has to continue evolving to accommodate the particular context of each industry. Only then will the life sciences (not to mention other markets) have a truly turn-key HPC solution that can benefit labs and private companies of every size.
The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) standard is one of the leading benchmarks for measuring energy efficiency in a data center. But there are some situations where an energy-efficient change to a data center will actually register as more wasteful by the PUE. For this reason, it’s important to know the gaps in the PUE metric.
Winston Saunders has described just such a case on the Intel Server Room Blog in an article titled, “Turning the Tide: CIO’s dilemma with PUE”.
The dilemma, according to Saunders, is this: “If improving the efficiency of your data center is an important goal, should you incentive [sic] the organization to improve PUE?”
Taken as a goal in and of itself, the PUE may lead data center operators astray. Take this example discussed by Saunders. A data center is running old servers with processors from 2006 (e.g. Intel Xeon 5160). These processors consume more power and perform less calculations than processors that came out in 2010 (e.g. Intel Xeon 5670).
Here’s the problem: if that data center chose to upgrade their old and inefficient servers to newer systems running more efficient and higher-performing processors, the PUE metric of that data center would actually increase (meaning, that data center would be less efficient according to the PUE).
The reason why this would happen is because PUE compares how much energy is consumed by IT equipment in a data center compared to all other energy expenditures (for lighting, cooling the servers, and other infrastructure). So, the more of the total energy is used to power the servers and not the other systems, the better the PUE score and – in theory – the more efficient the data center.
Back to our example of the data center that upgraded its old servers. This data center’s new servers drain less power. This means that the IT portion of total energy consumption in the data center decreases, which means the PUE will register this hardware upgrade as less energy efficient. Of course, the truth of the matter is the exact opposite.
Saunders illustrates the importance of considering PUE in context very well in his article. Anyone responsible for controlling data center costs should consider this (and other) gaps in PUE when making truly energy-efficient decisions.
Micheal Feldman of HPCwire has written an interesting article about a startup company called Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) that has a competitive and innovative product in the server cooling market.
GRC has developed a server rack that lies horizontally on the floor and is filled with an oil-based cooling fluid. Any server that is built according to the standard form factor can slide into the rack and be cooled by the oil bath.
Servers stored in a liquid solution? For this stroke of innovation (actually, the idea is not entirely new, as Feldman notes, but this is its most recent reiteration) GRC has been selected as one of the “Disruptive Technologies of the Year” for SC ’09 and SC ’10.
So how can servers live underwater (actually, under oil, since oil does not conduct electricity) safely? GRC can take any standard server (including blades and GPUs), remove its fans, and seal it with a special coating to make it safe for oil immersion. According to GRC, 250,000+ server hours of testing their racks has not revealed any malfunctions due to the cooling system.
So what are the advantages of this new kind of cooling system? As Feldman states: “The solution is advertised to reduce the cooling energy by 90 percent and cut overall power consumption in the datacenter by up to 45 percent. The pitch is that a single 10kW server rack at 8 cents per kWh will save over $5,000 per year on energy costs alone.”
Although at least one large supercomputing location (the Texas Advanced Computing Center) has begun using these server racks with happy results, GRC is having a difficult time partnering with server manufacturers to cover their servers under warranty if they are used in a GRC rack.
There are various liquid-cooling solutions on the market, but GRC’s is one of the most creative and cost-effective. It is indeed disruptive technology with lots of cost-savings potential. If GRC can overcome the stigma in the market against dunking servers into liquid, its technology can perhaps become a key player in the cooling industry.