Datacentre 2020: Greener, faster, more flexible

Datacentre 2020: Greener, faster, more flexible

...that of ASCI Red, a 1996 supercomputer that used nearly 10,000 200MHz Pentium Pro processors and required a million watts (1MW) of electricity. The TRC, by contrast, consumes just 62W of power.

TRC, which is a blanket term for more than 100 Intel projects being conducted worldwide, is a proving ground for new architectures including a 'tile' approach in which large numbers of identical cores are arranged in a matrix and linked using high-bandwidth interconnects. "In our simulations, we've gone out to thousands of cores for these critical applications," says Bautista.

Our mantra is that we'll blade everything.

Tony Parkinson HP VP industry standard servers Asia Pacific

Increasing core density is only one part of the TRC effort: complementing the architecture is a shift towards new developments such as a built-in 5-port message router, fine-grained power management to reduce overall consumption, and 3D stacked memory, which increases data density by allowing the addressing of data along three axes instead of the current two. "The architecture is not so much about the core as it is about the way data moves," says Bautista.

By tying memory to individual cores of the chip architecture, Intel can substantially reduce the latency incurred by the movement of data into and out of the processing core; in current chip architectures, the interconnects that link CPU and memory are a major bottleneck that will be addressed later this year with the QuickPath common system interface interconnect, which is built into the upcoming Nehalem and Tukwila processors.

Given the industry's inexorable progression along a performance curve driven by Moore's Law, the odds that innovations such as QuickPath will even figure in processor architectures by 2020 or beyond are quite low. However, the research work being done in projects like TRC will have long-term implications on processor design — particularly in terms of bolstering the multi-core concept to turn CPUs into clusters combining processing core, memory, cache and other previously separate components.

Tackling the rest
Researchers are also working on reworking long-established designs for other key server components: emerging from decades of development, for example, phase change memory (PCM) chips — a faster, higher-density memory architecture — were this month debuted to the market by Numonyx, a joint venture between Intel and STMicroelectronics. PCM is expected to improve performance considerably over current options, and as economies of scale kick in, it could displace flash memory in many applications.

Solid state disks (SSD) are the hard drive alternative pioneered years ago by Australian firm Platypus Technology. Recently they have hit the mainstream after being offered as an option in notebooks from Apple, Dell, and others.

The architecture is not so much about the core as it is about the way data moves.

Jerry Bautista, Intel director of technology management and teraflops management

SSD has already gained favour as an improved form of cache in some server installations, but high costs have limited its applicability. Over time, however, declining costs and better reliability — particularly important given reports that SSD-based laptops have serious reliability issues — will bring SSD into the mainstream.

Hard drives aren't likely to go anywhere anytime soon, however, since they continue to offer the best price-per-performance ratio of all storage options — and that is only likely to continue as hard drive manufacturers continue to squeeze more and more storage out of the same-sized disks.

Speed is an issue, however: current 15,000-rpm designs are pushing the limits of mechanical viability, warns Parkinson, a trend that should give ever-improving SSD technology a much higher profile in coming decades. Within the datacentre, SSD will likely find a home as a temporary storage medium, holding the most frequently-accessed information in its role as the primary tier for hierarchical storage management (HSM) solutions.

Shining a light
Current research into server architectures is focused on reducing power consumption, increasing the modularity and scalability of chip designs, and eliminating persistent bottlenecks — such as interconnections and memory-chip latency.

While researchers have proved incredibly resourceful in extending the life of current architectures, the next generation of research is taking server design in a completely new direction.

A major focus is the movement towards replacing existing electronic wiring with connections based on optics and the transmission of light. Numerous companies have been working on developing such optical solutions. In March, IBM announced a major breakthrough with the creation of a Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication research program.

Widespread interest in optical server interconnects is driven by one basic fact: light propagates faster through fibre-optics than electrons through wires. This translates into unprecedented speed and capacity that has, for example, allowed telecommunications carriers and big businesses to...

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