Cloud Operating System - Are you interested in helping?

[tsdnz]

working on the upcoming Broadwell-EX it is a monster with nearly 200 cores.

Wow, that would be fun to play with..

Ali

[Brendan]

Hi,

working on the upcoming Broadwell-EX it is a monster with nearly 200 cores.

A single Broadwell-EX is (up to) 24 cores now, and there's rumours Intel will release a 28-core version.

Your "200 cores" is from computers with 8 sockets (and 8 Broadwell-EX chips) - e.g. 8 * 24 = 192 (or 8 * 28 = 224).

Based on previous pricing (Intel's 22-core Xeon E5-2699 v4 at around ~$4100 a chip) you can expect a price of around $35000 for a system by the time you add on a (very expensive) 8-socket motherboard, a few (very expensive) 1500W+ power supplies, some RAM, some hard drives, etc.

In comparison; Xeon Phi will be ~72-cores for around $5000. In other words, for the same $35000 you could get 7 Xeon Phi machines with a total of 500 cores (and as a bonus you get ~8 GiB of high bandwidth "MCDRAM on chip" and AVX-512).


Cheers,

Brendan

[Brendan]

Hi,

Thanks for responding, you make excellent points. You know a lot more about the hardware than I do. What hardware would you suggest?

I wouldn't suggest... The problem is that I don't actually know what "cloud" is supposed to mean.

Do you need a huge amount of permanent storage without much processing (cloud storage)? Do you need a large number of small/weak virtual machines? Do you need "high FLOPS" number crunching? Do you need low latency/high bandwidth networking between individual computers? Do you need fast Internet connections from "cloud" to the remote customer? The answers to these questions all depend on what "cloud" means to you, and what your cloud is intended to be used for.

I would like:

• 4-8 cores
• Memory not an issue, minimum 8GB, quick-ish, ECC
• 64 Bit, SSE2+, would like AVX, PCIe 2+ 8xSlot
• 2.0 GHz +
• And cost efficient

You'll find that there's a "sweet spot" where everything is cheaper because it's what most people end up buying. Your specs seem to be right in the middle of that sweet spot.

To test what?

To test if the OS works efficiently on computers that cloud providers are likely to use you need computers that cloud providers are likely to use.

To test the code I need multiple servers running, a minimum of 5 just to get it started. Currently I have code running as separate "OS's" inside an OS....., this was fine but I am at the stage where this is impossible to do. (Things happened in life that reduced my money, time and assets. Not a divorce, very weird experience.... Now to rebuild)

So you're testing how hard it is to saturate a gigibit ethernet switch (and not testing anything to do with the OS)?


Cheers,

Brendan

[Schol-R-LEA]

I wouldn't suggest... The problem is that I don't actually know what "cloud" is supposed to mean.

No one does. It is a vague marketing term meaning roughly, 'something to do with something living on some massive server farm somewhere'. It has no technical meaning at all. I won't say the term has no meaning of any kind, quite, but it is mostly just a catchphrase for a large number of things that used to be considered unrelated, such as automated offsite backup; client-server programs (which is also what 'web services' really means, just with the specific organizing principle of using HTTP for transfer and either XML or JSON for serialization, and usually being limited to tickling a database somewhere); web front ends for things like mail servers; and whatever else the corpse-rat marketing teams think will sell better with a fresh coat of paint.

Well, unless it's a company like SalesFarce, in which case as far as I can tell it means 'holding your development tools and code for ransom on our servers and brainwashing you into thinking that it's a good idea to hand total control of your company's software system and customer data over to us'. But then, my hatred of that loathsome beast, their horrid products, and their evil consultants is well known, so you should probably consider that a biased opinion.

[tsdnz]

No one does. It is a vague marketing term meaning roughly, 'something to do with something living on some massive server farm somewhere'. It has no technical meaning at all. I won't say the term has no meaning of any kind, quite, but it is mostly just a catchphrase for a large number of things that used to be considered unrelated, such as automated offsite backup; client-server programs (which is also what 'web services' really means, just with the specific organizing principle of using HTTP for transfer and either XML or JSON for serialization, and usually being limited to tickling a database somewhere); web front ends for things like mail servers; and whatever else the corpse-rat marketing teams think will sell better with a fresh coat of paint.

Well, unless it's a company like SalesFarce, in which case as far as I can tell it means 'holding your development tools and code for ransom on our servers and brainwashing you into thinking that it's a good idea to hand total control of your company's software system and customer data over to us'. But then, my hatred of that loathsome beast, their horrid products, and their evil consultants is well known, so you should probably consider that a biased opinion.

I agree. I am hoping to make things better and easier, although it depends on who uses and/or markets their solutions on this platform.

[tsdnz]

So you're testing how hard it is to saturate a gigibit ethernet switch (and not testing anything to do with the OS)?

Hi Brendan. I am testing how user-space software scales, allocating resources (Cores, servers, etc..), the message speed between servers, etc..., and adjusting the kernel code as I go.

Ali

[ggodw000]

Hi,

working on the upcoming Broadwell-EX it is a monster with nearly 200 cores.

A single Broadwell-EX is (up to) 24 cores now, and there's rumours Intel will release a 28-core version.

Your "200 cores" is from computers with 8 sockets (and 8 Broadwell-EX chips) - e.g. 8 * 24 = 192 (or 8 * 28 = 224).

Based on previous pricing (Intel's 22-core Xeon E5-2699 v4 at around ~$4100 a chip) you can expect a price of around $35000 for a system by the time you add on a (very expensive) 8-socket motherboard, a few (very expensive) 1500W+ power supplies, some RAM, some hard drives, etc.

In comparison; Xeon Phi will be ~72-cores for around $5000. In other words, for the same $35000 you could get 7 Xeon Phi machines with a total of 500 cores (and as a bonus you get ~8 GiB of high bandwidth "MCDRAM on chip" and AVX-512).


Cheers,

Brendan

Close, 200 is from 4 socket with 24 with hyperthreading enabled. 4 * 2 * 24.
It does support 8 sockets but through 3rd party implementations

[Brendan]

Hi,

working on the upcoming Broadwell-EX it is a monster with nearly 200 cores.

A single Broadwell-EX is (up to) 24 cores now, and there's rumours Intel will release a 28-core version.

Your "200 cores" is from computers with 8 sockets (and 8 Broadwell-EX chips) - e.g. 8 * 24 = 192 (or 8 * 28 = 224).

Close, 200 is from 4 socket with 24 with hyperthreading enabled. 4 * 2 * 24.

Logical CPUs are not equivalent to cores and should never be called "cores". With hyper-threading disabled, four 24-core chips is a total of 96-cores (and has 96 logical CPUs). With hyper-threading enabled four 24-core chips is still a total of 96-cores (and has 192 logical CPUs).

Note that if you do want to compare logical CPUs; then Xeon Phi will be the first 80x86 CPU that has 4 logical CPUs per core, so a 72-core Xeon Phi has a total of 288 logical CPUs.


Cheers,

Brendan

[ggodw000]

Logical CPUs are not equivalent to cores and should never be called "cores". With hyper-threading disabled, four 24-core chips is a total of 96-cores (and has 96 logical CPUs). With hyper-threading enabled four 24-core chips is still a total of 96-cores (and has 192 logical CPUs).

Note that if you do want to compare logical CPUs; then Xeon Phi will be the first 80x86 CPU that has 4 logical CPUs per core, so a 72-core Xeon Phi has a total of 288 logical CPUs.


Cheers,

Brendan

yeah i needed to brush up in those terms. I just liked to see under linux "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep v4 | wc -l" shows 192 "entities".

p.s. too bad the forum does not allow more than 3 nested quotes