Seamicro cloud host

 

A startup company named seamicro in the United States recently launched a cloud host that supports 512 Intel Atom chips. I am also very interested in this host, so I spent some time reading some official documents and comments. The following is my summary of this cloud host seamicro.

 

Product Introduction

Seamirco cloud hosts are equipped with up to 512 atom 2.5 GHz, 1 TB memory and 64-inch hard disks or SSDS in a volume of 1/4 rack, in addition, the overall power consumption is controlled within 2 KW (equivalent to 8 desktops), and it will be listed in large quantities starting in July 30 this year. The product price is $0.139 million per server, which is "real ":

Figure 1. "Real capacity" of seamirco cloud host"

In general, it aims to achieve the same performance with 1/4 of the size of traditional PC servers and 1/4 of the power consumption.

 

Design Concept

In terms of design philosophy, seamicro has three main points:

1. Currently, the most important workload of data centers is Web serving, which is not traditional databases and other applications, and this load is also growing.
2. The Web serving load has its own characteristics for hardware requirements, because it can be divided into small blocks, so it can well support multi-core, not especially the current logic is very complex, CPU with high energy consumption, so the power-saving CPU will be very suitable for this load, such as Intel Atom.
3. Every computer has a lot of repetitive things, such as some components and power supplies on the motherboard, and these things consume a lot of power. If these devices can be shared, it will help save energy and other expenses.

 

 

Components

This is my personal summary of the Internal Architecture of seamicro cloud hosts.

Figure 2. Internal Architecture of sea micro VM instances (summarized by myself)

In general, the architecture used by seamicro is much different from that used by traditional PC servers. It is similar to that of the Cisco UCS system. It first removes 90% parts from the motherboard, the remaining core components are divided into Compute card, Io card, and Ethernet card. They are connected through a supercomputer-level fabric, and some basic hardware management functions are also provided.

Compute card

That is, the card used for chip placement. One compute card can be installed with eight atom chips, and each chip can be configured with 1 to 2 GB memory. a vm instance can contain 64 compute cards, therefore, it can support 512 atom chips.

Figure 3. compute card

Io card 

Each host has eight I/O cards, each of which supports eight 2.5-inch hard disks or SSDS, and raid these hard disks.

Ethernet Card

There are also eight Ethernet cards, each of which can support 8 1g or 2 10G network interfaces.

Fabric and routing Logic

These cards are connected by super computer fabric capable of delivering 1.28tbit per second, which means that each atom chip can use 2g of bandwidth, fabric also supports logic such as traffic management and Server Load balancer to ensure normal operation.

Seamirco Manager

For ease of use, it provides built-in DHCP server, PXE startup, built-in Terminal Server, System Management, and other functions.

Because 8 I/O cards and 8 Ethernet cards are shared by 64 compute cards through ASIC Technology, seamirco can be considered as implementing hardware-based I/O virtualization.

 

Use Cases and potential problems

First, as mentioned above, it focuses on common web serving applications.

Also, since the product has not yet been listed, I personally cannot provide very insightful opinions, but the following three questions have to be raised:

1. Learning cost: because of its innovative architecture, it is similar to the traditional PC server in terms of usage, so it will produce a certain learning cost.
2. Poor versatility: the reason for its own design and the lack of atom chip performance make it less universal, unlike Cisco's UCs, which is a-gold solution, this may bring some unfavorable factors to its future development.
3. ECC memory is not supported: for enterprise-level applications, ECC memory is definitely a required component. For details, refer to James Hamilton's article.

 

Finally, let alone complain that, for me and the whole country, the cloud computing wave is definitely not to be missed. Therefore, we must constantly learn from the pioneers of the United States, and strive to master the core technologies of cloud computing, so as to stand alone when the next wave arrives. Some people may say, "This is a bit crazy," but I always think that the difference between men is whether they own and stick to their dreams.

 

References:

1. "Atomic bomb" and innovative server thinking: seamicro launched a server product that integrates 512 atom chips.
2. Seamicro sm10000 system overview.
3. Seamicro technology overview.
4. Seamicro releases innovative Intel Atom server.