New Tech Press

Inside the hyper efficient server

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 08:59:23 +0000

Lou Covey
Editorial Director

Yesterday we unveiled the hyper-efficient data server at SLAC installed by a consortium of companies. In today’s video we take a look at the unit itself and how it reaches the energy/compute performance levels that could change how data centers operate.

This article sponsored by Clustered Systems

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EXCLUSIVE- SLAC installs hyper efficient server

admin — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:34:51 +0000

By Lou Covey
Editorial Director

A hyper-efficient, high-performance data center was recently installed at a SLAC facility in Menlo Park, California that operates on an energy efficiency several orders of magnitude over the most efficient data centers in the world— and it fits on the back end of a pickup truck.

While most server racks operate on a ratio of 1W of cooling power to 3-4W of processing power, the system installed at SLAC operates at a 1 to 200W ratio. The system is a collaborative project between Intel, Emerson Network Power, Panduit, One Stop Systems, Inc., Smart Modular, Inc. and Clustered Systems.

The high-density, high-performance system, located in the the LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source) facility, comprises 128 servers in an 800mm wide 48U rack containing four chassis with built in cooling and a 105kW n+2 redundant power supply. Each chassis cools the servers directly via a pumped refrigerant, up to 20 kw per 8U chassis, with up to 5 fitting into a standard IT rack. The space for the fifth chassis was allocated to a high-performance switch.

“This is HPC, Cloud or even a Data Center in a box,” said Phil Hughes, CEO of Clustered Systems. “A user can put a system anywhere there is power. No special facilities are required. We have calculated that capital expense can be reduced by up to 50% and total energy consumption by 30%. All investment can go into compute and not have to be shared with bricks and mortar.”

“To be able to pack such computing power into such a small space is unprecedented,” said Amedeo Perazzo, Department Head Controls and Data Systems, Research Engineering Division at SLAC.

New Tech Press was given an exclusive look at the system. Watch the first part of the video here:

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Cool stuff you might have missed at Design West, 2013

admin — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:42:21 +0000

Every year I go to Design West in San Jose to look for the cool geeky products and displays that you aren’t “officially” supposed to be there to check out, because you’re supposed to be doing work related research. This year, it was either a little tougher to find this information or their just wasn’t as much, but I found three off-the-beaten track exhibits that you might have missed. They included an android-based streaming media device that could be used to bypass the movie service in hotels; a device that you can use as a low-cost, DIY car locator (take that Lo Jack); and an honest-to-gosh Enigma Machine from World War II. Check it out.

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IC design is focused on wrong problems

admin — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:32:43 +0000

By Lou Covey
Editorial Director

The semiconductor design industry is focused on the wrong problems, according to Brad Brech, distinguished engineer at IBM at the ISQED symposium in Santa Clara yesterday. Stating his position in the most diplomatic terms, that was the upshot of his talk on “sustaining Innovation for Smarter Computing in Data Centers.”

While chip design is focused on increasing speed and computing power, Brech said efficiency and cost control are the biggest concerns of the end customer now.

Brech said the chip industry is still focused on incremental increases in performance but the improvements we see in semiconductors, 200ms to 300ms, is imperceptible to the end user.

“We need to bring a different kind of value to the customer,” he said. “In the 1970s and 80s the airline industry was trying to move people faster between destinations and almost went bankrupt doing it,” he stated. “There hasn’t been a faster plane put into service in over 20 years, but they have found ways to move more people. We need to do the same thing in IT regarding data.”

Brech stated that 70 percent of the IT budget is devoted to operations and maintenance of data centers while complexity of managing massive amounts of data grows steadily by orders of magnitudes. He said 22 billion devices are connected to the internet now, downloading and adding data every second. Applications such as cognitive computing and big data analytics are compounding the problem.

The solution, he stated, is in alternative designs that are cloud ready, data ready and security ready. Those are the applications technology needs to focus on.

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Quest for the $10K chip: Services are a mature niche

admin — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:44:34 +0000

Continuing on our series on reducing the cost of semiconductor design and manufacturing, we interviewed Josh Lee, CEO of Uniquify, on the design services niche. Lee took mild exception on Gary’s Smith’s definition of the niche becoming a “wild west” of competition saying the combination of IP integration with services has created a mature industry that is competitive but also crucial to creating new products in absence of venture capital involvement.

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