AMD unveiled on Monday its first SeaMicro product since it bought the microserver company for US$334n in March.
The new SeaMicro SM15000 server acts as a compute-and-storage fabric that enables a data center operator to pack up to 2,048 processor cores and more than 16TB of DRAM into a single rack, connecting it all to up to 1,408 solid-state or hard-disk drives through SeaMicro’s Freedom Fabric technology.
The server itself is a 10U chassis with 64 slots for AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon compute nodes. It provides up to 10Gbps of bandwidth to each CPU.
Andrew Feldman, corporate VP and genral manager of AMD’s Data Center Server Solutions group and SeaMicro’s founder, said that within the fabric, any compute node can talk to any storage disk. Feldman announced SM15000 at a press conference in San Francisco Monday.
“You get the ability to transform compute and storage by creating vastly different combinations and ratios of compute and storage,” he said about the new product. “You need no special skills.”
The system is optimized for big-data applications such as Apache Hadoop and Cassandra, as well as cloud-infrastructure deployments.
SeaMicro’s Freedom Fabric is now in its second generation. It supports both large- and small-core processors, as well as x86 and non-x86 processors.
Interestingly, the company chose its chief rival’s processor to be inside the first SM15000 to be available on the market. The system you can buy today is powered by Intel’s Xeon E3-1260L processor, codenamed “Sandy Bridge”.
AMD does not expect to have SM15000 carrying its own processors available for purchase until November. These will be powered by its newest Opteron processors based on the Piledriver core architecture.
The models coming out in November will also support Intel’s newest architecture: Xeon E3-12654v2, or “Ivy Bridge”.
The starting Opteron configuration will include 64 processors, eight hard drives and 16 1Gb uplinks.
Three essential ingredients make up SeaMicro’s secret sauce: I/O VT, TIO and Freedom Supercomputer Fabric.
The first is IO virtualization, which enables the company to strip its motherboards down to ASIC, CPU and DRAM. The second – it stands for “Turn It Off” – turns off unneeded CPU and chipset functions, optimizing the motherboard’s power consumption.
I/O VT and TIO create incredibly small and energy efficient motherboards, while SeaMicro’s fabric technology (what AMD essentially bought it for), ties it all together, linking a multitude of motherboards with a lot of bandwidth and low latency into a single 1.28-Terabit fabric.
While Supercompute Fabric interconnects components within the chassis, SeaMicro’s latest Freedom Fabric Storage extends the fabric outside the chassis, linking outside devices to the SM1500 cluster.
The system will not require a data center facilities upgrade, Feldman said. A key design consideration for SeaMicro was not to exceed existing power densities in today’s data centers, or not to exceed the power and cooling resources available.
Feldman said his advice was always not to try to get facilities to change. “Don’t ask software to change and don’t ask the facilities to change,” he said.