It's possible that people might confuse this bit...
> The performance of SCMs means that systems must no longer "hide" them via caching and data reduction in order to achieve high throughput.
...in the original article with your mention of caching; by "cache coherency," I assume you're referring that your addon (card?) can introspect into the CPU cache? That's pretty awesome if that's what's happening.
Some hopefully relevant questions from someone totally unfamiliar with this particular area:
- The original article mentioned "RAM emulation" (to put it crudely) as "unstable." Do you have any comment on this?
- Do you happen to have any performance figures you can release?
- From the blog article and video I get the idea that this is POWER-specific. :) Are you aware of any alternative offerings for x86 that offer similar performance?
- What does this thing (I have no idea if it's a card, a module...) look like? Being able to see "the thing" is generally really cool :)
My last question about POWER8 in general is arguably both on- and off-topic and might be a question for a different team, but do you know...
a) if/when POWER8 will manage to escape from the datacenter and become accessible to developers in the hobbyist/student sector? My understanding is that the architecture as it stands at the moment requires lots of different components that unavoidably require a lot of space; are you aware of any scaling-down efforts to produce (even (E)ATX-sized) POWER8 SBCs people can play with?
b) if/when full-scale POWER8 systems will be available in the style of Heroku/OpenShift, both of which have free tiers that allow for entry-level poking? I understand that RunAbove provided something along these lines with (1-?) POWER system(s), but that dried up some time ago, and I'm not aware of any replacements.
All in all, this Flash system looks pretty cool, and I can definitely say I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall for a day in your office, what with getting to play with 40TB of Flash (SSDs...?) - wow. :D
This is hard. Telling a program (and the OS) that different pages are fundamentally different will require some pretty drastic changes. For example- how does one malloc memory from an NVDIMM vs a regular DIMM, and differentiate between the two?
> Performance
Yes - as an example we can show that it takes ~26 threads on the CPU to drive ~450k IOPs to some external storage. Doing the same thing with the accelerated IO path requires about 4 HW threads on the main CPU. This kind of lines up with the point of the article.
> Are you aware of any alternative offerings for x86 that offer similar performance?
To my knowledge no one else has a similar architecture that's shipping today.
>- What does this thing (I have no idea if it's a card, a module...) look like? Being able to see "the thing" is generally really cool :)
And now I get it: RAM emulation is not 100% stable due to the fact that application architecture simply isn't optimized at all to handle the interfaces yet, as opposed to flaky hardware (my initial arguably logical assumption). The article could have made that a little plainer, thanks for clearing that up.
And thanks for dropping those performance figures; if there was an ELI5-sized soundbite explaining the rationale behind this card, that would be it.
( http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeImFive (ELI5) explains complex subjects using accessible, respectful simplifications. If I may say so, your explanation fits precisely into that category. :P)
It's sad there's nothing like this for x86, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it were deemed too difficult to support an I/O path as performant as this without uncomfortable architectural changes. On that note, POWER8 is still at the point where it has the chance to lock in a future-proof architectural design, and hopefully it takes full advantage of that.
My mention of ATX was simply a reference to "it doesn't need to be tiny or cool, it just needs to exist," but it appears the board you linked is currently the only product with any sort of vague open market presence. I definitely look forward to more accessible POWER architecture products in the future. :D
Finally, thanks heaps for the PTOpenLab link! I'm still figuring out their points system and how that translates to daily usage allowance, but this looks incredibly cool. It's places like this that are laying the groundwork :)
These are my own hazy opinions, but I suspect it starts at "Wallet vaporizes from shock" and goes up from there.
I remember reading about how old IBM mainframes used to have a couple ThinkPads (literally two, for redundancy) bolted just inside the cabinet door, just to change low-level configuration settings. It seems to me that these POWER8 boxen are aimed toward that end of the market.
YouTube's history interface is terrible, but I managed to dig this out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOzPTopt7HE - which shows the different discrete components in a POWER8 system and how they're put together. I should probably do a bit more research on this, that video is quite basic (and 2 years old now).
POWER8 systems seem to necessarily take up a lot of space, and not does this contributes to the raw material cost, it's also a factor in renting, considering that you can pack a basic but decent punch with 1U or 2U of x86. My guess is that IBM isn't trying to be competitive here, but aim for a specific market. That'll influence the price too.
It's thanks to market factors and the state of education (which sometimes produces wins like these!) that places like PTOpenLab exist, I think (again, this is an [un]educated guess), and I'm super appreciative that they do. I haven't figured out how the "blue points" system works yet though (you get 500, and use 10/day for running a VM); I can at least say that the number doesn't increase each day. I vaguely recall reading something to the effect of creating HDD images for the platform would give you points based on how many other people downloaded them (there's somewhere you can upload to), but I can't find that documentation now.
Another fun tidbit: the dashboard UI is based on SmartAdmin (a premium jQuery plugin, apparently), which comes with Chrome-compatible voice control (note the mic button at the top-right). The voice command list doesn't show because of a 404, but you can find the list in app.config.js (F12 -> Network -> reload page) - scroll to the pile of "show"s. Useless, and horribly flaky, but extremely cool. :D
The SuperVessel lab's free, and there are several resources to rent time on a P8 VM if SuperVessel isn't appropriate.
Also, the video you found is the E8xx product line, which are at the high end of the enterprise / scale-up product line, and (incidentally) different from Mainframes.
Here's some links about the 2U / 2socket boxes if space of each node is important:
Oh, TIL; I had no idea it was actually free. I understood that each user got 500 points and that you use 10/day, which gives you 50 days of usage... aaand then I'm not sure. I'm not dissing it, I just don't understand (and there's zero documentation).
And thanks for the video links! I'll definitely check out the YouTube channel.
PS. I'm getting multiple errors in the dashboard when I try to switch to NewYork1 zone. Where would be a good spot to mention this?
It's possible that people might confuse this bit...
> The performance of SCMs means that systems must no longer "hide" them via caching and data reduction in order to achieve high throughput.
...in the original article with your mention of caching; by "cache coherency," I assume you're referring that your addon (card?) can introspect into the CPU cache? That's pretty awesome if that's what's happening.
Some hopefully relevant questions from someone totally unfamiliar with this particular area:
- The original article mentioned "RAM emulation" (to put it crudely) as "unstable." Do you have any comment on this?
- Do you happen to have any performance figures you can release?
- From the blog article and video I get the idea that this is POWER-specific. :) Are you aware of any alternative offerings for x86 that offer similar performance?
- What does this thing (I have no idea if it's a card, a module...) look like? Being able to see "the thing" is generally really cool :)
My last question about POWER8 in general is arguably both on- and off-topic and might be a question for a different team, but do you know...
a) if/when POWER8 will manage to escape from the datacenter and become accessible to developers in the hobbyist/student sector? My understanding is that the architecture as it stands at the moment requires lots of different components that unavoidably require a lot of space; are you aware of any scaling-down efforts to produce (even (E)ATX-sized) POWER8 SBCs people can play with?
b) if/when full-scale POWER8 systems will be available in the style of Heroku/OpenShift, both of which have free tiers that allow for entry-level poking? I understand that RunAbove provided something along these lines with (1-?) POWER system(s), but that dried up some time ago, and I'm not aware of any replacements.
All in all, this Flash system looks pretty cool, and I can definitely say I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall for a day in your office, what with getting to play with 40TB of Flash (SSDs...?) - wow. :D