Servers are actively being developed ARM-based chips
Consortium of leading European companies and research institutes, announced plans to develop a new type of computer architecture based on ARM processors and capable of providing ekzaflopsnye calculate the consumption of 15 or even 30 times smaller than today’s supercomputer systems.
This new project, called Mont-Blanc, coordinated by the Barcelona supercomputer center (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, BSC) and a budget of over € 14 million, including more than € 8 million investment by the European Commission.
The main initial objective – to create a full-featured high-performance supercomputer based on chips that are used today in embedded systems, and overcome the limitations found in the prototype and build applications that can take advantage of this ekzaflopsnogo supercomputer.
A key factor is the efficiency of the system. The plans of the project – to develop by 2020 a system capable of providing performance at the level of energy consumption at a ekzaflops not exceeding 20 MW. Learn more about freebsd vps.
The project leader Mont-Blanc, Alex Ramirez (Alex Ramirez) said: “Firstly, we must bear in mind that not all energy consumption is used for calculations within the nuclei. In modern systems, processors consume the lion’s share of energy, often 40% or more. The remaining energy is used to power the memory, connectors, network and storage subsystems. Also, a significant fraction of the energy expended in useless power supplies and cooling systems, which do not provide a contribution to productivity. ”
The project involved Mont-Blanc, companies such as known in the HPC-market Bull, which develops chips ARM, and creating a communications system for supercomputers Gnodal. The project also brings together four leading supercomputer centers hosting partners in PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), which should focus on software development.
Bloomberg reported resource at the same time with reference to own anonymous sources that the company HP (Hewlett-Packard) plans to sell servers with an ARM, Texas created a startup Calxeda from the city of Austin. It is worth noting that the company owns part of Calxeda ARM. In this case, as reported, ARM processors are supposed to be used in the creation of data centers, for which energy consumption is a critical parameter.
Calxeda reported earlier this year that its server processor with four core ARM Cortex A9 consumes only 5 watts, taking into account related memory DRAM. According to the company, the chip is able to provide 5-10-fold advantage in performance and 15-20-fold advantage in terms of price and performance compared with conventional processors. Marvell Technology introduced a similar chip in the past year, currently used in the test systems.
Intel takes steps to counter the spread of ARM-servers, producing energy-efficient version of the processors Xeon. The company also reported that in 2012 it will be submitted to the Atom processor for servers, consuming less than 10 watts. In June Caxeda announced a partnership with 10 companies in the field of working with her as yet unreleased processor for servers. These companies are mostly small software developers to cloud computing.
Project Mont-Blanc and that more than important, plans HP (on the latter, however, has known only by hearsay) are very bad news for Intel and the x86 architecture as a whole, which today dominates the market for PCs and servers.