New Cavium ThunderX2 adopts 64-bit ARM-based servers to address application and workload requirements

New Cavium ThunderX2 adopts 64-bit ARM-based servers to address application and workload requirements

By Unknown   02:34   No comments:

Semiconductor vendor Cavium announced Monday ThunderX2, its second generation of workload optimized ARM server SoCs that targets high performance volume servers deployed by public/private cloud and telecom communications data centers and high performance computing applications. It is optimized for data center workloads such as compute, security, storage, data analytics, network function virtualization and distributed databases.

The ThunderX2 line of processors currently includes four workload optimized processors targeting different workloads.

The ThunderX2_CP has been optimized for cloud compute workloads such as private and public clouds, web serving, web caching, web search, commercial HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modeling. This line supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network Interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. It also includes accelerators for virtualization and vSwitch offload.

The ThunderX2_ST has been optimized for big data, cloud storage, massively parallel processing (MPP) databases and Data warehousing workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network interfaces, PCIe Gen3 interfaces and SATAv3 interfaces. It also includes hardware accelerators for data protection/ integrity/security, user to user efficient data movement.

The ThunderX2_SC has been optimized for secure web front-end, security appliances and cloud RAN type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. Integrated hardware accelerators include Cavium’s industry leading, 5th generation NITROX security technology with acceleration for IPSec, RSA and SSL.

The ThunderX2_NT has been optimized for media servers, scale-out embedded applications and NFV type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces. It also includes OCTEON style hardware accelerators for packet parsing, shaping, lookup, QoS and forwarding.

“The Cavium ThunderX2 will expand the market opportunity for ARM-based server technologies by addressing demanding application and workload requirements for compute, storage networking and security,” said Simon Segars, CEO, ARM. “ThunderX2 demonstrates Cavium’s ability to deliver a combination of innovation and engineering execution and the new product family increases the momentum for server deployments powered by ARM processors in large scale data centers and end user environments.”

Cavium’s ThunderX2 SoC line is supported by a comprehensive software ecosystem ranging from platform level systems management and firmware to commercial operating systems, development environments and applications.

Cavium has actively engaged in server industry standards groups such as UEFI and delivered numerous reference platforms to an array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its position in the open source software community driving upstream kernel enablement for ThunderX, actively contributing to Linaro’s enterprise and networking groups, investing in Linux Foundation projects such as Xen and OPNFV and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s ARMv8 server implementation.

ThunderX2 will deliver two to three times the performance across a range of standard benchmarks and applications compared to ThunderX, while boosting the market reach of the ThunderX line of processors by targeting applications that require high single thread performance such as web search, graph analytics, a variety of enterprise applications such as massively parallel processing (MPP) databases, data warehousing and enterprise HPC applications such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modelling. ThunderX2 will deliver comparable performance at a better total cost of ownership compared to the next generation of traditional server processors.

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Cavium ThunderX Benchmarks Part II: Why enterprise ARM developers need these machines

Cavium ThunderX Benchmarks Part II: Why enterprise ARM developers need these machines

By Unknown   00:06   No comments:

Several months ago we had pre-release benchmarks of the Cavium ThunderX. The company promptly contacted us and wanted to show what its hardware can do. Those benchmarks were done on an older OS with older software. Over the past few weeks we have been working with both the single and dual socket (48 core and 96 core) variants of the Cavium ThunderX part and what struck us is how fast the software side is maturing in key areas. We will have more in-depth benchmarks of the platforms running real world workloads soon.

Prior to the release of the Cavium ThunderX most 64-bit ARM development, even for server applications, has been done on low price ARM development boards. There the typical core and memory count is both fixed and low. Networking is often provided by a USB to Ethernet adapter. This is a scene of typical ARM development hardware to date at many Silicon Valley startups:

While that is great for IoT development, the Cavium ThunderX platform is completely different. There are both single and dual processor configurations scaling up to 96 64-bit ARM cores. Memory capacities can scale into the TB range, or about 1000x a typical IoT development board. Networking provided on our test platforms is 80Gbps for our single processor system and 160Gbps on our dual processor system. Onboard storage can support more than a dozen SSDs or hard drives. Here is what our dual Cavium ThunderX 96 core test platform (a Gigabyte R270-T61) looks like inside:

The bottom line is, if you are developing for ARM in the data center, you need to get a Cavium ThunderX platform as it is the best data center ARM platform generally available today. In the remainder of this article, we are going to show how some benchmarks around the evolving software and development ecosystems. These benchmarks will show how the Cavium ThunderX is a competitive server platform. With a few weeks of working with the hardware/ software, and given the fact we manage both lab and production servers with Ubuntu, we are going to share some anecdotal experiences as well.

The Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Update

We originally received our single Cavium ThunderX 48 core system Gigabyte R120-T30 that we reviewed here. It had Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pre-installed from Cavium. After poking around with the machine running in our data center, there were a few nuances to the setup and ARM platforms:

• - Using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS required quite a bit of patching to get great performance
• - Trying to pull working software via “apt-get install” if it resided in universe did not always work. Sometimes packages were just not present. Those that did install were not optimized.
• - As Cavium pointed out, using newer gcc versions and building applications from the latest source was often the way to get good performance out of ARM platforms.

We updated the 1S ThunderX platform to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS the same week we received the 2S ThunderX platform in our data center. It was immediately clear that the experience was much better. Software that required patching instead worked out of the box. Packages installed from repos almost every time with even many multiverse packages working without having to custom compile software. This was a completely different experience.

The update had two implications. First, unlike Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS felt more like it just worked. Second, out of box performance was much better than in 14.04.

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