Showing posts with label OPiuM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OPiuM. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Enterprise Millicluster System Specifications



The specifications below are very tentative, I have tried to be conservative, but this is a paper design at this point, and a real design could end up significantly more or less dense in terms of compute and power usage per rack unit (RU).

The Millicluster board I described is half the width of a typical enterprise motherboard. Its only 0.4" thick, so we can stack four of them high (4x0.4=1.6") in the 1.75" height of a 1U package.

Hence a standard 1U Enterprise Server Package contains Eight Milliclusters. This has a compute density of 112 OPiuM modules per RU, 4704 modules in a 42RU rack. The power consumption peaks under 160 Watts/RU, and idles at less than 24 Watts/RU. Maximum rating would be less than 6.7KW/Rack, which is quite reasonable. The CPU performance totals 60 GHz/RU, 2,520 GHz/Rack. There is 28 GBytes/RU of RAM, 1,172 GBytes/Rack.

The network has 8 Load balancer/bridge-routers per RU with 8 Gbits/RU module bandwidth on 16 redundant Gbit ports. An Ethernet switch could be added to the design to reduce the port count at a cost of a few watts and dollars. For storage a microSDHC flash memory socket at each module would hold a 2 GB microSD for very low cost, 4 GB for capacity, 8 GB in 2008.

There are many optional interfaces that could be used for specific applications. All modules include an ATA disk controller if needed, so each Millicluster could have connectors to support hard disks and DVD-ROM players. For graphics the i.MX31 modules include an OpenGL based 3D graphics accelerator and an LCD display driver with touch screen input. There is a camera input and video compression engine, with stereo audio and video playback. Modules also include multiple USB and serial interfaces.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Enterprise Millicluster


Taking the components I have already menioned in previous posts, we can assemble them into a small cluster that seems to be a useful size and specification for an Enterprise Server building block. Its a cluster of millicomputers, so we may as well coin the name Millicluster as we go along (and register the millicluster.com etc. domains to point here :-)

Using 8-port USB switches, we could lay out 14 i.MX31 based Millicomputer modules behind a PPC440EPx based Ethernet Bridge that runs Linux so it is general purpose, but it will be pre-configured as a Load Balancer. This gives us a 1 Gbit/sec redundant network (it has two 1 Gbit links in, but only two 480Mbit links to the millicomputer modules). There is a total of 7.5 GHz of CPU, 3.5 GBytes of RAM, and 56 Gbytes of Storage using 4 GByte microSDHC flash memory cards on each Millicomputer.

This depends upon having a high speed 8-port switch, and so far I have found some products from Belkin and D-link that have one upstream port and seven downstream. I'm not sure what chipset they use, but they are inexpensive and have been available for a few years, so this seems reasonable.