Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

Nvidia announces Project Denver high performance ARM processor which includes Server Scenario

I’ve been discussing the idea of ARM servers for a couple of years and had early discussions with some folks with ARM on whether there was a scenario for ARM servers.

Today Nvidia announces an ARM processor targeting the server scenario.

NVIDIA Announces "Project Denver" to Build Custom CPU Cores Based on ARM Architecture, Targeting Personal Computers to Supercomputers

NVIDIA Licenses ARM Architecture to Build Next-Generation Processors That Add a CPU to the GPU

LAS VEGAS, NV -- (Marketwire) -- 01/05/2011 -- CES 2011 -- NVIDIA announced today that it plans to build high-performance ARM® based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers.

Known under the internal codename "Project Denver," this initiative features an NVIDIA® CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU.

This new processor stems from a strategic partnership, also announced today, in which NVIDIA has obtained rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture. In addition, NVIDIA licensed ARM's current Cortex™-A15 processor for its future-generation Tegra® mobile processors.

"ARM is the fastest-growing CPU architecture in history," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "This marks the beginning of the Internet Everywhere era, where every device provides instant access to the Internet, using advanced CPU cores and rich operating systems.

The mobile market is helping to drive energy efficient processors and this momentum is spilling over to the server market.  Within two years we should see ARM servers that are using a fraction of current servers.  Which is a big direction for greener data centers.

Why argue over a PUE change of 0.10 when you can drop your power use by 80%.

One Role to Rule All Server HW, Facebook's Manager of Supply Chain Operations

I've run some analysis thanks to a variety of contributors on the Facebook Server count and the number is bigger than anybody else I have seen discuss.  Over 100,000 servers.  When server counts get that high managing them takes a different type of person than the purchasing department.

I found this job posting on Facebook for Manager, Supply Chain Operations.  The Facebook guys have identified a Wal-mart type of supply chain manager.

Manager, Supply Chain Operations

Facebook is seeking a seasoned leader to be responsible for managing the Supply Chain Operations organization and supplier/partner strategy for all Facebook server suppliers. This includes strategic direction applied to tools development, supplier performance management, vendor relationships, and business processes. This is a full-time position based at our headquarters in Palo Alto.

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Responsibilities

• Manages up to ensure executives are informed of a partner performance/development/investment/escalation/negotiation approach

• Manages a complex supplier, and fully understands the interdependencies and the impact to the business.

• Responsible for the commercial relationship with the partner

• Consults and partners with others, offers views and advice that add value and perspective to situations

• Jointly responsible for supplier sourcing strategy, including risk mitigation

• Responsible for partner based strategy – including industry understanding and driving competitive advantage for Facebook

• Responsible for delivering a supplier’s productivity and overall cost performance

• Responsible for benchmarking a supplier’s costs globally. Delivers and identifies a supplier’s pipeline productivity

64-bit ARM chip coming?

ComputerWorld reports on a 64-bit ARM chip coming soon.

Arm readies processing cores for 64-bit computing

By Dan Nystedt

November 19, 2010 05:34 AM ET

IDG News Service - Arm Holdings will unveil new plans for processing cores that support 64-bit computing within the next few weeks, and has already shown samples at private viewings, sources close to the company said at an Arm technology conference in Taipei.

The company's move into 64-bit computing shows it's serious about putting out powerful processors to meet the needs of businesses and consumers. Most personal computers today are based on 32-bit computing, while supercomputers, servers and other bigger systems use 64-bit computing, which can address more memory.

2 Dell DCS Customers, LBNL & Saudi Aramco

I was talking to a friend and he said whenever they talked to Dell they couldn’t find out much information about who Dell DCS’s customers were.  There are approximately 30 clients of DCS.  Part of their criteria is customers purchasing over 2,000 servers with the following characteristics.

 

So, I spent a few hours researching who Dell DCS customers.  I came up with about 20 DCS customers.  I am not going to share the complete list on this blog, but I am sharing the list with a few others who can help me figure out who the others are.

Let me tell you how I found two of the DCS customers – Lawrence Berkeley National Labs & Saudi Aramco.

LBNL was easy as they have a bunch of Dell DCS Xanadu systems in Top 500 Supercomputer list.

I blogged about Xanadu first generation.  Here is generation II.

Dell has launched new XS-23 II high-end x86 servers, codenamed Xanadu II in celebration of the IInd birthday of Data Center Solutions (DCS), a division producing servers aimed at easy customizability for cloud computing and other data center applications.

The XS-23 come with a choice of several different processors, including Intel Nehalem chip, although those machines will be offered in blade configurations with a built-in fabric architecture. It will be provided as four two-socket servers in a 2U standard rack mount footprint, accommodating up to 24 disk drives. According to Norrod, customers can configure up to 88 of Dell's new servers with 704 processing cores and 396 TB of storage, plus switching, in a single rack, for 25% higher density in comparison to similarly outfitted blade servers on a per-U basis.

When I was going through Dell DCS documents on their web site I found a reference to an Oil & Gas customer. 

The Data Center Solutions (DCS) team have an Oil & Gas customer that is always looking to push the envelope when it comes to getting the most out of GPGPU’s in order to deliver seismic mapping results faster.

On the Supercomputing 500 site going through Dell Hardware, I found Saudi Aramco with a bunch of HP and Dell Hardware.  5 systems all with 512 servers, dual processor, 4-6 core processors. 

The other 18 on the list are interesting to study.  It’s not that hard to find the Dell DCS customers

Dell powers up its Cloud

I just started following Barton George’s blog as I found it an easy way to track Dell’s cloud and server innovation.

What I do, and have done, for a living

Last year I joined Dell as their cloud computing evangelist.  As such I act as Dell’s ambassador to the cloud computing community (I had to supply my own sash).  I also work with analysts and press and am responsible for messaging as well as blogging and tweeting (you can follow me on twitter at barton808 and you know where my blog is).

Prior to Dell I spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of roles from manufacturing to product and corporate marketing.  My last three years there I spent as an Open Source evangelist, avid blogger, and driver of Sun’s GNU/Linux strategy and relationships.

Barton posts on Dell’s launch of its Cloud Solutions.

Dell Cloud Solutions up and running!

Back in March we announced Dell’s cloud solutions.  Today at a press conference in San Francisco we announced their general availability along with some examples of customers who are employing them. (Woohoo!)

What’s the big idea

The idea behind these offerings has been to leverage the experience we in the DCS group have gained over the last several years providing custom systems to some of the world’s largest cloud providers.  These new solutions are targeted at organizations the next tier down (the “next 1,000″) from the hyperscale customers we have been working with.

Here is the official Dell press release.

Dell Data Center Solutions Unit Momentum Builds; Helps Customers Easily Build And Deploy Cloud And Hyperscale Computing Infrastructures

Date : 11/19/2010

Round Rock, Texas

• Uniserve , InsightExpress and Eightfold Logic are building out highly efficient and scalable data analytics and cloud computing infrastructures with help from Dell

• Dell’s Data Center Solutions team is providing specialized cloud and data analytics solutions that are workload optimized and deliver a great return on investment by leveraging partnerships with Joyent, Aster Data andGreenplum

• Dell’s new PowerEdge C series experiencing rapid market adoption to be the popular choice with customers looking for high-density compute performance with energy and cost efficiency

Dell today announced growing market adoption and interest in its Dell Cloud Solutions as customers across a variety of industries including market research and IT hosting services have chosen Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) to build out their own cloud computing, data analytics and hyperscale data center installations. Supporting Dell’s broader Virtual Era strategy, these holistic cloud solutions are comprised of pre-tested, pre-assembled, fully-supported and optimized hardware, software and services. As a result, these customers have experienced a more responsive web infrastructure, deeper business insights and reduced overall operating costs.

What's in Dell's move to Quincy, WA? Competing with IBM and HP?

Wenatchee World has the story on Dell coming to Quincy, WA for a data center.

Secret's out? Dell headed here

Blog: Everyday Business

By Mike Irwin

November 2, 2010

Dell, the world's third-largest computer company, has purchased property in Quincy that could become the site of the Columbia Basin town's newest data center, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce reported this morning.
Underway for months, the top-secret purchase — known as Project Roosevelt — would add the computer manufacturer to Quincy's list of tech industry standouts, such as Microsoft and Yahoo.

DataCenterKnowledge has more details.

Officials with the Port of Quincy have confirmed that the deal is related to Project Roosevelt, the code name for a data center that could include grow to 250,000 square feet over time. The initial specifications call for 7 megawatts of power, ramping up to 30 megawatts over time. The search also considered sites in Douglas County.

Why is Dell building 7 MW with growth for 25 MW?  Perot systems is the competitor of HP/EDS and IBM services. Perot systems doesn't have the data center inventory that HP and IBM has.

Converged infrastructure is a hot topic, and it is much easier to sell a converged infrastructure solution when you have the data center contract.  The Dell data center is most likely a cost effective solution for hosting, gives a low carbon data center alternative, and becomes a showcase for Dell/Perot.

Dell announced today the acquisition of Cloud Solution SaaS company Boomi.

Dell to Acquire Boomi; Adds Industry’s No. 1 Integration Cloud™ Solution to SaaS Capabilities

Date : 11/2/2010

Round Rock, Texas

Dell today announced it has agreed to acquire Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration leader Boomi to help businesses reap the full value of cloud computing. Powered by its revolutionary AtomSphere technology, Boomi offers the industry’s only pure SaaS application integration platform that takes the cost and complexity out of integrating applications by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications with no appliances, no software and no coding required.

 

4 MW vs. 12 MW - CPU vs. hybrid CPU/GPU solution, which is greener?

Nvidia has a press announcement regarding World's Fastest Super Computer.

NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Power World's Fastest Supercomputer

Half the Size, Lower Power and 50% Faster Than World's Top Supercomputer

The Tianhe-1A Supercomputer, located at National Supercomputer Center, Tianjin

SANTA CLARA, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 10/28/2010 -- Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer revealed today at HPC 2010 China, has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today(1).

Tianhe-1A epitomizes modern heterogeneous computing by coupling massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, enabling significant achievements in performance, size and power. The system uses 7,168 NVIDIA® Tesla™ M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs; it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone.

One of the points in the press release is the power comparison of a an all CPU vs. the Hybrid CPU/GPU solution.

More importantly, a 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 megawatts. Thanks to the use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it 3 times more power efficient -- the difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year.

Gartner says Green increasing as selection criteria for Asia PC buyers

Gartner has a press release on its new findings regarding PC buyers in Asia.

Gartner Says Environmental Sustainability is Becoming a More Important Criterion in PC Brand Selection in Asia Pacific

PC Providers Need to Prove Capabilities to Remain Viable as PC Replacement Cycle Takes Off

Singapore, October 12, 2010 —  Personal computer (PC) upgrades in Asia Pacific are in full swing in the second half of 2010 and businesses are placing a greater emphasis on environmental sustainability in their choice of PC brand, according to new research from Gartner, Inc. However, analysts say PC providers are not offering the right mix of capabilities and messaging on sustainability and risk being excluded from lucrative opportunities.

The Asia Pacific PC market is forecast to grow 20.4 percent in 2010 and continue to grow at a compound average growth rate (CAGR) of 20.8 percent between 2009 and 2014.  In the PC markets of Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, stronger growth for 2010 and 2011 is expected as replacements gain momentum.

In some ways I think this press release is for the PC manufacturers.

Gartner advises PC providers to build sustainability capabilities and messaging on top of a robust offering of products with proven reliability, service and support, and also stress the long-term cost savings.

“When PC buyers are prepared to invest in this, they will want credible information and a choice of products and providers.  The pressure to act responsibly and contribute to the sustainability of the environment cannot be ignored.  These actions only will improve and increase with time as more products become available and the cost for going green becomes negligible.”

Greening the Data Center moves to Network Gear

ZDNet covers a new silicon standard for network gear to use less energy and be greener in the data center.

Green moves to the datacenter network silicon level

By David Chernicoff | October 5, 2010, 9:27am PDT

Summary

Low-level energy savings across your corporate networks becomes a hardware possibility with the newly ratified IEEE standard.

With the ratification of the IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard the energy savings mantra of the green movement dives deep into the underlying infrastructure of your datacenter networks. The new standard is intended to allow energy savings at the network silicon level by reducing power demand when there are periods of reduced link utilization.

Broadcom announced the Silicon to support the 802.3az standard.

Broadcom Corporation today announced that it has the industry's broadest portfolio of available silicon solutions supporting the newly ratified IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard.
This extensive portfolio includes switch silicon that spans entry level unmanaged to enterprise and metro class switches; single, quad and octal Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) physical layer devices (PHYs); dual and quad 10GbE PHYs; 10/100 and 1GbE controllers, and 10GbE converged network interface controllers (C-NICs).

Broadcom EEE-compliant products offer energy savings of up to 70 percent or greater and provide customers with end-to-end silicon and software solutions that enable faster deployment of energy efficient networks.

Schneider Electric's Media Event, a great time to learn, network, and test new image gear

I just spent a day at Schneider Electric's media event in Chicago. Reflecting on what I got out of the event I'll just dump a stream of what comes to mind.

I was looking forward to connecting with Kevin Heslin with Mission Critical Magazine and Rich Miller with DataCenteKnowledge as any significant data center event has both of them there.  Between the three of us creating content on  data centers, Kevin made the point how much content would be loss if for some reason something happened to all three of us at the event.  I don't put myself in the same category as Kevin and Rich who are professional media people, but I do get media status with my blogging so I enjoy the benefits of seeing how things are presented to the media.

As part of getting ready for Schneider's event, Data Center Dynamics, and AFCOM Data Center World (where by the way I'll see Rich and Kevin again), I decided to upgrade my media capabilities.  I am a Canon user which can be just as religious an issue vs. Nikon.  After much thought I decided to get a Canon 7D.

EOS 7D

EOS Digital SLR Cameras

Maximum resolution for any application.

The EOS 7D features a Canon-designed 18.0 Megapixel APS-C size CMOS sensor that captures such a high level of resolution it's easy to crop images for enlargement without concern of losing detail. A major factor in reducing noise, the CMOS sensor assures that images shot at highest sensitivity will be remarkably smooth. Dual DIGIC 4 Image Processors ensure that images are captured, processed and saved with remarkable speed. The EOS 7D's ability to capture and process data of images shot at 18.0 Megapixels at 8 fps, as well as Face Detection Live Mode, Full HD video recording, Auto Lighting Optimizer and Lens Peripheral optimization are all possible thanks to the Dual DIGIC 4 Image Processors.

One of the features I was playing with is to tether the Canon 7D to my laptop to allow quick transfer of images to my PC which I actually got a bunch of comments from other media people asking about my setup at the event.  My Lenovo X200 Tablet worked well capturing images and video while tethering transferring images in seconds. 

I couldn't find an exact video of what I was doing on YouTube, but here is a Canon 5D Mark II connected to a Mac.  This worked extremely well and I am looking forward to try the setup at other events to enable live blogging with better quality images and video.

What did I get out of the event for content?  I met Kevin Brown and his presentation on Infrastruxure. 

APC by Schneider Electric unveiled the next generation InfraStruxure architecture, a high performance, scalable and adaptable data center architecture. InfraStruxure integrates power, cooling, racks, security and management in a modular form factor and is a building block of Schneider Electric’s comprehensive energy management architecture portfolio, EcoStruxure.  This new generation of InfraStruxure delivers a 25%  increase in power and cooling capacity and a 15% smaller footprint, all while reducing cost by 15%.   Holland Computing Center at the  University of Nebraska-Lincoln, uses InfraStruxure to run high performance computing for cutting-edge research, including a 21 TFlop supercomputer, shared memory processing, grid computing and development of hadoop-on-demand and other custom implementations.

And spent a bunch of time with software his software subject matter expert Jon Gould diving into details of their modeling and simulation.

APC also introduced new features to the overall InfraStruxure management software portfolio, to better enable IT managers to change the way they monitor, operate, manage and maintain their data centers through the integration of new virtualization capabilities and upgraded energy efficiency and operations software. Enhanced capabilities include:

• The new Data Center Lab application within InfraStruxure Capacity - a data center project management tool that enables the design of new data center build-outs or data center upgrades.
• InfraStruxure Capacity’s updated Impact Analysis application - provides an instant overview of data center physical infrastructure operations including UPS, power distribution and cooling independent of the types and brands of equipment present in the data center.
• InfraStuxure Efficiency 1.1 -  IT managers can quickly and easily report on monthly energy consumption of their data center subsystems including CO2 emissions, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and DCIE (Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency). 
• InfraStruxure Capacity Network Management Tool - provides insight into equipment dependencies including mapping and documenting fiber and copper networks from servers, via patch panels, to switches or routers allowing IT managers to document connectivity, manage their network structure and plan and control network usage.

Saw Rick McKay's BMS solution for data center facility operations.

I'll write a blog entry about Aaron Davis's presentation.

Overall I have a much better understanding of the Schneider Electric's portfolio, and met a lot of Schneider/APC people I am sure I will connect with again.