Tag Archives: computer architecture

Intel ‘Re-imagines’ The Data Center With New Avoton Server Architecture, Software-Defined Services

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Intel isn’t just pushing Avoton as as low-power solution that’ll compete with products from ARM and AMD, but as the linchpin of a system for software defined networking and software defined storage capability. In a typical network, a switch is programmed to send arriving traffic to a particular location. Both the control plane (where traffic goes) and the data plane (the hardware responsible for actually moving the bits) are implemented in hardware and duplicated in every switch.

via Intel ‘Re-imagines’ The Data Center With New Avoton Server Architecture, Software-Defined Services – HotHardware.

Software defined networking replaces this by using software to manage traffic (OpenFlow in the example diagram below) and monitoring it from a central controller. Intel is moving towards such a model and talking it up as an option because it moves control away from specialized hardware baked into expensive routers made by people that aren’t Intel, and towards centralized technology Intel can bake into the CPU itself.

Why mobile web apps are slow

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At some point it will occur to you that keeping 30MB buffers open to display a photo thumbnail is a really bad idea, so you will introduce 6) the buffer that is going to hold a smaller photo suitable for display in the next screen, 7) the buffer that resizes the photo in the background because it is too slow to do it in the foreground. And then you will discover that you really need five different sizes, and thus begins the slow descent into madness. It’s not uncommon to hit memory limits dealing just with a single photograph in a real-world application.

via Why mobile web apps are slow | Sealed Abstract.

Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs

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This time around, Intel is actually much more interested in telling us about that lowered power consumption, as is evident in the use of phrases like “biggest [generation-to-generation] battery life increase in Intel history.” By the company’s measurements, a laptop based on Haswell should in some circumstances be able to get as much as a third more battery life than the same laptop based on Ivy Bridge.

via Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs | Ars Technica.

Haswell is the sort of CPU upgrade we’ve come to expect from Intel: a whole bunch of incremental improvements over last year’s model, all delivered basically on-time and as promised. Again, we’ll need to have test systems in hand to verify all of the lofty claims that the company is making here, but at least on paper Haswell looks like a big push in the right directions. It increases GPU power to fight off Nvidia and AMD, and it decreases overall power consumption to better battle ARM.

Realtime GPU Audio

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While these techniques are widely used and understood, they work primarily with a model of the abstract sound produced by an instrument or object, not a model of the instrument or object itself. A more recent approach is physical modeling- based audio synthesis, where the audio waveforms are generated using detailed numerical simulation of physical objects or instruments.

via Realtime GPU Audio – ACM Queue.

There are various approaches to physical modeling sound synthesis. One such approach, studied extensively by Stefan Bilbao,1 uses the finite difference approximation to simulate the vibrations of plates and membranes. The finite difference simulation produces realistic and dynamic sounds (examples can be found at http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/FDGPU). Realtime finite difference-based simulations of large models are typically too computationally-intensive to run on CPUs. In our work, we have implemented finite difference simulations in realtime on GPUs.

bcache

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Bcache is a Linux kernel block layer cache. It allows one or more fast disk drives such as flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) to act as a cache for one or more slower hard disk drives.

Hard drives are cheap and big, SSDs are fast but small and expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could transparently get the advantages of both? With Bcache, you can have your cake and eat it too.

via bcache.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Lawrence Livermore Scientists Set a New Simulation Speed Record on the Sequoia Supercomputer

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The records were set using the ROSS (Rensselaer’s Optimistic Simulation System) simulation package developed by Carothers and his students, and using the Time Warp synchronization algorithm originally developed by Jefferson.

“The significance of this demonstration is that direct simulation of ‘planetary scale’ models is now, in principle at least, within reach,” Barnes said. “‘Planetary scale’ in the context of the joint team’s work means simulations large enough to represent all 7 billion people in the world or the entire Internet’s few billion hosts.”

via RPI: News & Events – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Lawrence Livermore Scientists Set a New Simulation Speed Record on the Sequoia Supercomputer.

Maybe they can get SimCity modeled correctly.

The Eternal Mainframe

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The Internet and web applications have been enablers for these server farms, for these mainracks, if you will. People use these web apps on smartphones, on notebooks, on tablets, and on the fading desktop. The client paints pixels while the server farm — the mainrack — does the backend work. More than a dozen iterations of Moore’s Law later, and the Wheel of Reincarnation has returned us to terminals connected to Big Iron.

And there’s the rub. The movement to replace the mainframe has re-invented not only the mainframe, but also the reason why people wanted to get rid of mainframes in the first place.

via The Eternal Mainframe – Throwww.com.

A guide to the system-on-a-chip

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To help you keep things straight, we’ve assembled this handy guide that will walk you through the basics of how an SoC is put together. It will also serve as a guide to most of the current (and future, where applicable) chips available from the big players making SoCs today: Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Intel, and AMD.

via The PC inside your phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip | Ars Technica.

SoC=System on a Chip

Calxeda’s ARM server tested

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At first sight, the relatively low performance per core of ARM CPUs seems like a bad match for servers. The dominant CPU in the server market is without doubt Intel’s Xeon. The success of the Xeon family is largely rooted in its excellent single-threaded (or per core) performance at moderate power levels (70-95W). Combine this exceptional single-threaded performance with a decent core count and you get good performance in almost any kind of application. Economies of scale and the resulting price levels are also very important, but the server market has been more than willing to pay a little extra if the response times are lower and the energy bills moderate.

via AnandTech | Calxeda’s ARM server tested.

As usual another thorough review from Anandtech.  Below is another interesting architectural tidbit.

CalxedaSoc_575px

Let’s start with a familiar block on the SoC (black): the external I/O controller. The chip has a SATA 2.0 controller capable of 3Gb/s, a General Purpose Media Controller (GPMC) providing SD and eMMC access, a PCIe controller, and an Ethernet controller providing up to 10Gbit speeds. PCIe connectivity cannot be used in this system, but Calxeda can make custom designs of the “motherboard” to let customers attach PCIe cards if requested.