InfiniBand to build the world's first CLOUDX architecture Cloud computing Experience Center

From VCD to DVD, from U disk to mobile phone, what hot to do what, this phenomenon is a lot of domestic small and medium-sized development of the portrayal. While in the transformation of Nanjing, the company's reverse thinking, to avoid the hot technology. When he chose InfiniBand, InfiniBand was too highbrow to be known. However, in the big data, cloud computing, green it has become an industry trend today, the unpopular technology has become hot.

Although Mellanox does not show a mountain of water in the IT market, in High-performance Computing (HPC), this server and storage End-to-end connectivity solution provider is famous. Its high-speed interconnect technology is not only used in 50% of the world's top 10 supercomputers, but also the most efficient supercomputers in the world's 500-strong systems.

April 10, such a "tall" company and into the IT market only 3 years to join forces, together to create the world's first CLOUDX architecture Cloud computing Experience Center.

The strategy of transformation

In the International Cloud Computing Advisory Committee 2014 China Cloud Computing summit scene, as the Undertaker's chairman of the Hu Yongsheng, to this reporter to explain the way to the transformation of the temple.

1989, with the ideal of realizing the value of knowledge, Hu Yongsheng to venture into the sea. After years of work, eventually failed, with Hu Yongsheng words, this venture failed, experience accumulation is not, the harvest is a lot of lessons.

By the year 1997, the enterprise began to transform the communication service, the main partner is Motorola. By 2008, Motorola mobile phone business and telecommunications equipment business is splitting up, at the same time, Hu Yongsheng increasingly feel the pressure from the market: the threshold of communication services market is getting lower, but labor costs are getting higher.

So, Hu Yongsheng also sprouted the idea of transformation. And the first time in the market to fight the harvest only the lesson is different, Hu Yongsheng Frankly, this time with Motorola's cooperation, from learned a lot. As the first National Quality Award winner, Motorola Quality control system and technology research and development, have left a deep impression on Hu Yongsheng, of course, the biggest harvest or Motorola cooperation in the communication services to learn a lot, but also accumulated a wealth of service experience.

With the rise of the Internet of Things, Hu Yongsheng occasion into it field, 2000 years settled in Nanjing City, Jiangsu province Baixia High-tech Industrial Park, from the research and development of things networking platform.

Hu Yongsheng, who has just entered the IT market, soon experiences loneliness from the IT market, "we are new recruits in the IT market, there is no user accumulation, and the hot areas are crowded with vendors." ”

The IT market is far more open than the communication market, the market threshold is lower; due to the mature technology, the hot market competition is not only white-hot, the phenomenon of brand centralization is increasingly strengthened. Enter such a market, for Estaing, is tantamount to just out of the Communications Service Market "Den", and fell into the IT Hot market "tiger", enterprise transformation lost significance.

"In the end, we chose the InfiniBand market that we all didn't pay attention to," he said. The high-end market to do very few people, so that we can stand with others at the starting line. "Hu Yongsheng said. It became Mellanox's China distributor, and Mellanox was the world's leading supplier of InfiniBand technology.

With the continuous improvement of processor performance, the bandwidth and delay of the existing system input and output PCI bus become the bottleneck of the data transmission between servers and servers, so the new generation system I/O Architecture InfiniBand protocol arises.

At present, the cluster architecture has become the mainstream of HPC market, network bandwidth and latency between cluster nodes are two key factors affecting the performance of HPC system, so InfiniBand technology is taken for granted first by HPC, a high-end narrow market.

Hit

HPC, as the name suggests, is the pursuit of the goal of High-performance computing. The early HPC main users were national laboratories and universities related to nuclear research in the United States, and HPC architectures were optimized for specific applications. Because the market is very narrow, there is no commercialized system, which forces users to develop HPC architecture.

In the field of HPC, these non-IT professionals do even better than IT professionals, and in 2007, the National Laboratory of the nation's largest nuclear-weapon system, the country's lab, wrote on its homepage that its HPC architecture was licensed to clay. Clay was once the overlord of the mega-machine market, and Clay's system ranked second in the top 500 of the super computer rankings.

Chairman of the HPC Committee of Jiangsu Computer Society, professor of Earth Science and Engineering, Nanjing University Zhou is a non-it professional who specializes in geophysics.

After experiment and theory, computing technology has become the third paradigm of scientific discovery, so HPC is becoming an important tool for scientific research and even industry innovation. In the process of HPC moving from dedicated to generic, the cluster architecture and Linux gradually replace the expensive parallel architecture and become the mainstream of HPC.

The weekly group is the explorer of the early cluster architecture application. As early as 1994, Zhou, who worked in the United States, built a cluster system in his own home to deal with his professional applications, "at the time, parallel systems were very expensive, and only universities and government-funded research institutions were available." and the cluster system is called the supercomputer of the poor. "Zhou said," Thanks to the rise of Linux, individuals have the ability to build a cluster system, in the process of building the system, the hardware needs to optimize the system software to cut, and thus accumulated a lot of experience. ”

Before returning home in 2003, Zhou also worked in Silicon Valley for several years on HPC research, and also saw a number of new technology start-ups.

Zhou back to his alma mater, Nanjing University, still engaged in his geophysical research. At this time geophysical research, the demand for HPC computing performance may be described by "greed".

After being elected as the chairman of the HPC committee in Jiangsu Province, Zhou also often wondered what to do for the enterprise in addition to geophysics and HPC. "The Special Committee will be funded by some companies to think about how to give back to the business sector in a technical way," Zhou said.

With the rise of cloud computing and the scramble to build data centers, when the data centers were built, it was found that the cost of construction was just as high, and the annual power consumption was an alarming figure.

"The power consumption in the data center is mainly from the server, and the CPU in the server is the power consumer," Zhou said. "InfiniBand's low latency is mainly achieved by RDMA (Remote direct data reading) technology, which can bypass the CPU and directly read data remotely." ”

"Bypassing the CPU" means that when the RDMA is working, the CPU is not working, or when data communication between the server or between the server and the memory, the CPU is idle, the energy consumption will be greatly reduced.

The field of HPC is more fancy for the infiniband of low latency, while industry is not yet clear about the enormous potential of InfiniBand in data center energy conservation. For InfiniBand, the Zhou knew the business was coming.

So, Zhou with the top two domestic server manufacturers to talk about their own ideas, but each other think InfiniBand highbrow, little interest.

In October 2011, Zhou and Hu Yongsheng met at the National High Performance Computing Symposium held in Jinan, where both sides hit. Do Mellanox agent business Hu Yongsheng Heart understand, InfiniBand market seems narrow, but its potential market space is very large, just did not start.

The interest of the weekly group is still in geophysics. So he just worked as a part-time chief scientist at the temple, using his spare time to help the Titans.

Prove yourself with strength

"Professor Zhou is very familiar with the technology, he provides the bottom of the hardware and software optimization program, especially the customization of Linux;" The Seventy or eighty-person technical team is in place, and we've invested more than 10 million in the lab. "Hu Yongsheng said,

Thanks to the more than 10-year technical build-up of the weekly group and the technical build-up to the InfiniBand agency and testing prior to the tech team, project progress quickly, after six months of research and development and testing, the September, in the "Cloud Bridge" series of products technology and design stereotypes expert review meeting, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, engineering institutes, The expert of the University gives a high evaluation to the Cloud Bridge series of products: This series of products realizes the great breakthrough of high data transmission and storage technology in the technology system of cloud computing, IoT and mobile Internet, and the whole performance reaches the international advanced level.

"We also took the product to the lab for testing. "Our products are far more efficient in input and output than high-end products on the market, with prices only half the price of EMC," Hu Yongsheng said. ”

Although the product performance and price are competitive, but Hu Yongsheng still some worry: "It users do not know, and stender in the IT field also no user accumulation." ”

In order to break through the market bottlenecks, Titan is constantly looking for opportunities with it vendors PK. Zhongyuan Branch of the province to a mobile company to involve 30 million of Internet users data analysis of the Cloud project. Stender heard, put his own machine sent to the past for free trial. Stender deputy General Manager and CTO Cho Hao, the system not only fully meet the needs of users, and users said, compared with the use of foreign minicomputer program, the project cost reduction of 90%, energy consumption reduced by 80%, the annual saving of about 260,000-kilowatt.

At the beginning of April this year, the Nanjing Information Center ended its 1-month test of a storage virtualization platform based on Cloud Bridge memory, with a total of 12 tests, all qualified. Test report that: in the Stander storage environment, VMware performance than FC (Fibre Channel) storage environment test values, in line with the Nanjing Information Center business needs. FC storage is synonymous with today's high-end storage.

In addition to competing with the international IT vendors, he uses internet thinking to build a platform within the company that allows users to put their apps on the table for free. Use is to let the user have the best experience, for this reason, and Mellanox with the Mellanox, based on the cloud computing architecture CLOUDX, built a cloud computing platform. So there is the beginning of this article of the scene.