Change is hard, but it can be done and the benefits of change usually outweigh the concerns which were on our minds before we made the change.

When making the change from running your solution on a RISC architecture to running that solution on a Xeon architecture, the biggest concern usually relates to whether that solution will run at the same level as on the previous architecture. I'm not talking about performance specifically, but usually the question is around whether operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Solaris on Xeon will meet your business needs for yourmission critical solutions.

Like the underlying improvements in the microprocessor, I believe that there have also been major fundamental improvements in the operating systems that run on both today's and the soon to come next generation microprocessors (sorry, my obligatory Nehalem-EX advertisement... coming soon in 2010). A decision made many years ago to run your solution on Unix/RISC was made based on comparing all the different variables at that time to pick what was right for your business. At that time you likely decided that your solution would not run on these operating systems, these operating systems were not suitable for your mission critical workloads etc. Probably right decision at that point, but like everything else decisions get revisited based upon the here and now and what may have been the right solution in the past (and right decision) may not be the right solution for your needs now.

I wanted to share some thoughts specifically on Redhat Linux today. Lets take a little look at Redhat Enterprise Linux. Current versions of Redhat can deliver what is required for your critical solutions. RHEL is ready and here are some of the reasons cited by Redhat in recent webinars on this topic and my interpretation of their comments

• Hosts real-time global mission-critical infrastructures and operations 24 X 7 - its tried and tested by other Enterprises
• Enables 5x9s availability in highly secure environments - pretty important to most critical solutions
• Contributes measurable reductions to TCO and enables, agile, standardized, and virtualized infrastructures - TCO benefits through standardization
• Has major ISVs on-board with the majority of 3rd party Unix applications have Linux and/or Windows versions available - the ISVs that traditionally delivered applications to you based on Unix, also have versions supported on Linux/Windows
• Many customer unique applications are developed with programming languages such as C, C++, JAVA, or J2EE and can be migrated to Linux and / or Windows - your applications can be moved
• Hosts most major database systems standard for your infrastructure - all the major databases run and run well on Linux

One of the other things we encounter a lot is around whether the technical considerations to move from one operating system environment are too high to overcome and outweigh the benefits of moving. There are always technical considerations and things that you need to know to move from one environment to another. However you are not alone in trying to understand these technical considerations. Redhat have done a phenomenal job of documenting the challenges of moving from say Solaris to Linux and have developed a great Strategic Migration Planning Guide. This is available on request. In recent webinars Redhat outline some of the things that you need to consider for the following technical categories

- Development Environment; Kernel tuning; Security; Filesystems; Debugging, tracing, Profiling; Command Differences; Deployment methods; Software Management; Virtualization; Application considerations 

In addition to the current versions of Redhat running on Intel architecture, we are also working very closely on future versions that will take advantage of the 20+ new RAS features that are planned for Nehalem-EX - more on that in a future blog

You are not alone, resources, tools and expertize exist to help you make that move and reap the business benefits while still delivering to the requirements of your business. Check out Redhat online tools for more information that dives deeper into all the areas for consideration http://www.redhat.com/migrate/solaris_to_linux/

We think Redhat Linux and Xeon are ready to run your mission critical workloads and solutions...What do you think?

What is iWARP?  (Click here to find out)

Ethernet Tom here.  I’ve recently come into the Intel Ethernet group – marketing Ethernet products in the HPC, Financial, and Cloud verticals.  

And very HPC relevant -  I’ve been very busy getting things lined up for Super Computing ’09 and wanted to share what we have happening:

·         3 demos: 

o   Intel Booth:  Two 6-node clusters (96 total cores!) running NYSE’s Data Fabric* middleware – showing iWARP vs. non-iWARP 

o   Supermicro Booth:  4-node cluster running Fluent

o   EA Booth:  4-node cluster running Linpack in a converged Ethernet environment

·         5 presentations:

o   Data Transportation at iWARP Speed – Feargal O’Sullivan – NYSE Technologies

o   Memory Virtualization over iWARP for  Radical Application Acceleration – Tom Matson – RNA Networks:

o   A 10Gigabit  Ethernet iWARP Storage Appliance – Paul Grun – System Fabric Works

o   CD-adapco Benchmarking Performance using Intel iWARP – William Meigs – Intel Corporation

o   iWARP – What & Why? – Tom Stachura – Intel Corporation

If you are here today (final day of SC’09!), stop by and check it out.  If not, I’ll come back later with some video links.

This week I'm in Portland, Oregon, where I call home. Its interesting for me since this is my first Super Computing conference, and soo far, I'm really impressed, not only by the intense knowledge and the plethera of scientific discovery all around, but also by the fact this conference is so well attended. There -s a huge trade show floor, filled to capacity where you can see everything from genome research to oil and gas exploration, to bio-computing. . It's very cool to see NASA, Oak Ridge Labratory, and many top universities all showing off the lastest in High Performance Computing, some very cool stuff indeed. From the point of view of higher learning and how super computers are changing the world, this is the place to be. Here are a few shots of the Intel booth in case you get a chance to come by and see us.

I'll be capturing some cool videos from the conference and you should keep a look out for these on Channel Intel at YouTube. Thanks for stopping by The Server Room.

I attended VMWorld in San Francisco and captured some video on Isilon, a great Intel-based scale-out solution. The first link is John Gallagher, Director of Product Marketing at Isilon, giving an overview of their products and how Intel adds to their solution.  He also talks about some of their more successful markets.  

The second link is a chalktalk provided by Nick Kirsch, Senior Product Manager at Isilon, in which he discusses how Isilon storage delivers scale out storage for large scale server virtualization.  I am also looking for any great Isilon success stories, so let me know!

Ok it may be that your IT department or enterprise applications are limiting your opportunity to adopt 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, but your inability to adopt a 64 bit CAD application can be very limiting to your productivity. 

Here as an example from a recent discussion with some end users who are involved in a workstation pilot with Intel.  When they moved to a 64 bit version of their favorite CAD application the time to open a 2.5GB file dropped from 20 minutes to less than 1.  

Question - How many files does your engineering team open a day?  What is the cost of the 20 minutes?

Customers operating in a 32 bit world are forced to work with smaller models.  You knew that.  And of course smaller file sizes will open faster. 

But….

Rather than working with the chassis, engine and transmission in a single view, you will need to work each one independently.  The results is you may miss a design interference, a misalignment or another obvious design issue, because you only had a partial view of the entire design.  More rework and more delays.

Yes but... many of the enterprise applications you use are 32 bit and you need to have a 32 bit workstation environment in order to access these tools.  That may have been true once, but with technology like Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O and Parallels™ Workstation Extreme software you now have the opportunity for an uncompromised workstation experience.  You get all the benefits of a 64 bit CAD application and you can still work within a 32 bit environment when you need to.  You can even pass the data between workstation environments.

Do not be too slow to adopt a 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, just opening files faster and working with a complete design can make eth cost of a new workstation irrelevant.

To learn more about Intel® Xeon® based workstations visit www.intel.com\go\workstation

Interactive Modeling and Simulation – Come on you are kidding!!

Recent advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series have brought the field of computer simulation to the threshold of a new era.  While not quite interactive, simulation and analysis can now occur at a pace that impacts decisions further upstream in the design process. 

Simulation and analysis tools are also no longer the domain of the expert.  Organizations can now potentially achieve a more efficient product development process by considering a reordering of product design activities and empowering engineers with easy-to-use and powerful 3D conceptual design tools and early access to CAE applications.

Why consider reordering your product development process?

This is not new news. Manufacturers know that when product analysis or simulation results trail the detailed design process that product changes are become significantly expensive and will most likely negatively impact new product release schedules. Worse yet, they also realize that changes made downstream in any design cycle are often “last minute” and almost always imply compromises on original design goals. This, of course, cuts into the product performance and profits of the new or updated product.

By reordering product design activities, manufactures may be able to achieve a more efficient product development process and reduce overall product development cost, time and risk.

No experts needed.

Don’t be fooled.  While ISV’s from ANSYS, ALTAIR, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM, SIMLUIA, SolidWorks and others have made tremendous strides in making their simulation products easier to use, you probably still need an expert.  However, their collective advancements in tools, wrappers, and easy-to-use frameworks that guide the engineers through complex multi-physics analyses with drag-and-drop simplicity make it easier to move analysis further upstream. 

That means your expert can now focus on the really hard problems.

Workgroup Computing – Bringing “Real” HPC Computing To Your Department

Using analysis and simulation to get results before the detailed design process begins will help ensure the CAD models meet performance requirements and will almost always mitigate last-minute and expensive design changes.

Large scale compute intensive jobs used to require investments and/or access to a divisionally shared, large scale cluster housed in a controlled Data Center environment …supporting hundreds of users.

While this may have been true a few years ago, the advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series now makes it possible to quickly and efficiently solve large scale problems closer to the engineers responsible for dealing with them, on compute clusters supporting small workgroups or departments of engineers vs. large scale clusters shared by hundreds of engineers.

As an example let’s look at the Cray CX1™ deskside personal supercomputer.  Like others in this new usage category, it presents an organization with a solution that is the "right size" in performance, functionality, and cost for individuals and departmental workgroups who want to harness HPC without the complexity of traditional clusters.  Equipped with powerful Intel Xeon 5500 series processors the Cray CX1 delivers the power of a high performance cluster with the ease-of-use and seamless integration of a workstation.

OK, You Can Give Me The Performance, But The Support Can Be A Nightmare

Intel® Cluster Ready makes HPC simpler.  It boosts productivity and solves new problems. The Intel® Cluster Ready program makes it simpler to experience the power of high-performance computing. 

Intel Cluster Ready presents HPC users a certification program that is designed to establish a common specification among original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and others for designing, programming and deploying high performance clusters built with Intel components.

For users, this certification means that these certified HPC systems will run a wide range of Intel Cluster Ready ISV applications right of the box.  Tested, validated and simple.

By selecting a certified Intel Cluster Ready system for your registered Intel Cluster Ready applications you can be confident that hardware and software components will work together, right out of the box. Software tools such as Intel® Cluster Checker help ensure that those components continue to work together, delivering a high level of quality and a low total cost of ownership over the course of the cluster’s lifetime.

To learn more about Intel HPC Technology visit www.intel.com/go/HPC

Prior to the Intel Xeon X5500 Server Platforms*, measuring server power was done via expensive equipment and could only be performed in a discrete fashion.  Unless you had tons of monitoring equipment to mash-up your power data - it was a tedious process.  Now, using Intel DCM and Node Manager - you can pull multiple servers worth of power info to make some important power decisions in your datacenter.

First of all, you need to baseline your workload.  If you're confident that you can replicate workload patterns then you've got a starting point.  Otherwise, it's usually a good idea to start monitoring and looking for some cyclical patterns and/or common data points (time, power, thermals, etc) to keep track of.

In this scenario (like in my last blog) we're using a SQL workload which can be modified to run the CPU at high levels for a relatively set amount of time.  The base workload runs for 7 min 30 seconds, as shown in the Intel DCM screencap below.

In this test case: Idle power for the 4 servers is 782W, and under load - the power increases to 1174W - which is a delta of 392W.  This power increase occurs when work is given to the server and the P/T states react to the workload and increase power/voltage to the system to increase performance.  Exactly what we've been used to seeing even since EIST was introduced several years ago.

Now, what I'll show you is something that may be very interesting in scale... I will power cap the servers by 20W each, and set the Intel DCM Power Policy to only allow 1095W for the 4 servers in the rack.

What is awesome here is that we can still finish the workload in the same 7 minutes 30 seconds.  So essentially, we have saved 80W of power for each set of 4 servers and still get the same amount of work completed!  In a large datacenter this can be HUGE in energy savings.

Let's do some quick math:  20W power savings per serer x 10,000 servers = 20kW power savings and you still get the work done.  I hope I just helped some of you server admins get some new ideas on your next "I need a raise" talk with your manager

*your mileage may vary, so test your own workloads and report out!

For those of you implementing the infrastructure of a cloud, often called IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service, one of the challenges can be “where to start?”. With the myriad of hw options and variety of software solutions finding a starting point can be daunting.

For example:

·         What server configurations are optimal?

·         How to structure the network?

·         What is the optimal storage configuration?

·         I really don't want to write this software , therefore, what is the cloud management stack that best suits my needs?

Assuming that cost reduction and/or agility are the reasons you are building a cloud (true for the vast majority of customers), then there is huge benefit from using a largely homogenous architecture: identical server, network, storage, and management configurations across the cloud implementation. This architecture addresses the maintenance aspects of the infrastructure (remove from service if it fails, replace when enough are out of service to justify a visit to the data center) as well as the operational aspect (no special cases). Getting to the point where workloads can be hosted in this environment requires effort but has a fairly quick payback once you complete the transition.

Even with this in mind, you still have to design the hardware infrastructure and then select a set of management tools.

Intel recognizes this need and has formed the Intel Cloud Builder program to help in this ‘getting started’ phase. If you are already well down the road to building a cloud, you will likely find the output from this program useful to understand the options available in the market.

Intel(r) Cloud Builder is a fairly simple program with a powerful output:

* using a defined hardware blueprint,

* using a cloud management software stack,

* run the combination on a Intel hosted cloud test bed,

* and document the results.

For more information, please go to Intel Cloud Builder Program.

Billy Cox

Director, Cloud Strategy

Intel Software and Services

Do you ever wonder where Spam comes from?  I have no idea where the meat-like version of Spam comes from (nor do I wish to ponder that mystery). But it is pretty well established that a huge component of the e-mail and IM Spam that we all know and hate is generated by automated programs (bots) installed on thousands or even millions of unsuspecting systems.  These bots are remotely controlled via command-and-control or even peer-to-peer networks (botnets) to do the bidding of the bot developer—such as propagate Spam or other malicious software or generate denial of service attacks against designated targets.  And all of this could happen without most people even knowing their system is doing anything. 

Botnets are the end result of many malware exploits—as viruses, worms, Trojans, drive-by or click-through attacks may deliver and propagate the bot payload. They are also a crystal clear example of how the objective of attacks have changed from hit-and-run high-profile grabs for fame to instead focus on stealth and establishing and retaining control of assets. Botnets are an ideal tool for the nefarious—they can command huge numbers of widely distributed systems at trivial costs.  While it is hard to estimate how many systems are part of a botnet, the potential is staggering.  For example, the much-publicized Conficker worm is estimated* to have placed more than 4 million unique IP addresses under the control of “bot-masters”. And this huge resource base allows the bot-masters to rent control of these resources to spammers or other agents looking for ways to generate attacks or other nuisances with low risk of being detected.  In essence, they are allowing criminals and spammers to outsource the generation of their malicious activities. It is a frightening business model indeed.

It is also a difficult challenge for IT. Thanks to botnets, it is possible for an IT manager or CIO to get a call from out of the blue asking why their systems are attacking some other company or government entity’s systems.  Or discover a botnets of 100’s of computers with their company.  These type of events can happen to the best IT departments (even Intel or the US Government). Clearly, IT needs tools to help prevent such scenarios, and the antivirus and intrusion detection/prevention industry is working hard to keep up with the rapid growth in the delivery vehicles for bot code.  The other weapon for IT managers is traffic analysis – looking for strange patterns of activity (such as bursts of e-mail traffic from selected systems or floods of network traffic generated against specific targets) that falls outside of business norms to determine if there is another business being conducted with their assets.  While being part of a networked world has wonderful, powerful benefits, it is not without enhanced risk. A botnet is not a network you ever want a member of.

Intel technologies like Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and instruction set optimizations such as STTNI can be part of these solutions.  Intel® TXT can be used in solutions that help protect systems from software attacks which provide the malware payloads to compromise systems.  In fact, Intel TXT (to be available with Westmere server systems) provides an entirely new protection capability for most systems—providing evaluation of the launch environment and enforcing “known good” code execution. This is important because most malware tools execute only once the system is booted—so Intel TXT provides a valuable complementary protection. And to help with the growing burden of run-time malware and attack analysis, new (with Nehalem) instructions that accelerate string manipulation can boost content inspection software ability to detect anomalies.  And research and development will ensure Intel continues to develop and deploy building blocks to help IT address today’s challenges and tomorrow’s.

We can do that most effectively only if we’re trying to solve the right problems.  Are your systems under attack? (yes, they are). What types of solutions are most effective for you?  Where is the greatest exposure? Is the pain in stopping attacks or cleaning up after them? This is certainly worth thinking about—before some Government agency comes calling asking why your systems are sending them so much spam!

*http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/wiki/pmwiki.php/ANY/InfectionTracking

Every day, Intel® technology and platforms help companies solve business problems and challenges. Here are a few of the growing number of stories and reasons for choosing Intel processors and technology.

Winning: Humana – Healthcare product and services company

Humana continues to refresh its infrastructure with more powerful, energy-efficient technologies. For Humana, technology is vital for providing information and a full array of health benefit services to members. To replace an outdated facility, the company worked with Intel to design a state-of-the-art data center with a compact, energy-efficient infrastructure that could deliver flexibility and scalability.

Read about it here

The results:

·          The Intel processor–based virtualized environment helps IT deploy new services quickly and ensure high availability.

·          Humana added 25 percent more servers in 56 percent of the previous space while decreasing data center power consumption by 16 percent.

Winning: Emerson Electronics

Emerson reshapes its IT infrastructure for future growth, consolidating approximately 135 data centers down to four using Intel® technology–based servers

Read about it here

The results:

·          3,600 physical servers are eliminated by virtualizing on Intel processor–based blade servers, for 18:1 consolidation worldwide

·          Power-saving processors help make Emerson’s new global production data center in St. Louis 31 percent more energy efficient than traditional data centers

Winning: Türkiye Finans Katılım Bank

Leading Turkish Financial Institution Drives Better Growth and Services with Intel®Technology. Türkiye Finans Katılım Bank makes use of the online Intel Xeon processor-based Server Refresh Savings Estimator

Read about it here.

The results:

Intel® Xeon® processor-based Server Refresh Savings Estimator¹ sets expectations clearly, predicting 80 per cent reduction in power/cooling requirements, and a 30 per cent increase in system performance already realized. With only 20 per cent of capacity currently utilised, bank has significant headroom for business expansion

Winning: Oracle IT

Oracle uses Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series–based systems with Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager to increase rack density and propel business growth. Refreshing its existing dual socket, quad-core servers on a three- to five-year schedule to increase processing capability and energy efficiency, but had no significant power management in use in the data centers.

Read about it here

The results:

More processing capability can fit within the data center power envelope because Oracle can actively manage power consumption for individual servers and applications.

·          Energy savings of 35 percent are projected with Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager, for reduced operating expenses

·          50 percent more servers per rack saves data center space and enables more growth while keeping costs low

Winning: DataPipe®

DataPipe® retains a competitive edge by designing a new facility and refreshing existing data centers with cutting-edge technology that can deliver outstanding processing performance for a broad range of customer applications. Low-voltage Intel® Xeon® processors help DataPipe create a dense, energy-efficient infrastructure for managed IT services.

Read about it here

The results:

                 New Intel Xeon Processors Provide a Foundation for Cloud Computing. With the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, DataPipe is creating

                a robust virtualized server environment, Stratosphere™, for hosting customer applications.     

The digital workbench is like the workbench at home where you have pliers, nails and hammers that we use to build or fix things—the workbench holds all the best, most useful tools to complete a project and makes them available at your fingertips.

The digital workbench replaces analog tools with digital tools and software suites from ISVs (e.g. Altair, ANSYS, Autodesk, Dassault CATIA, Dassault SIMULIA, ESI, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM and others).  These ISV’s are all laser focused on enabling designers to move analysis further up the design chain.  Couple this with recent performance gains available on workstations based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series from suppliers like Boxx, Dell, HP and Lenovo and you have the opportunity to now view your workstations as a digital workbench.  The result is a new environment that enables users to rapidly test and refine their ideas potentially at the speed of thought. 

The digital workbench, powered by two intelligent Intel® Xeon® 5500 processors based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, can help you transform complex and visually intensive data into actionable information at near-supercomputer speeds. 

One of the first questions in my mind when I was first exposed to Intel(r) Intelligent Power Manager (Node Manager) was "what is the performance impact of applying Node Manager technology?"  I will share some thoughts.  The underlying dynamics are complex and not always observable and hence it's difficult to provide a definitive answer.  Robert A. Heinlein popularized the term TANSTAAFL ("There ain't no such thing as a free lunch") in his 1966 novel “The Moon is a Hard Mistress”.  So, does TANSTAAFL apply here? Node Manager brings benefits with the ability for the application to designate a target power consumption, a capability otherwise known as power capping. On the cost side, Node Manager takes some work to deploy, and has performance impact that varies from very little to moderate.  On the other hand, Node Manager can be turned off, in which case there is no overhead.

Node Manager is useful even when it is not actively power capping but is used as a guardrail, ensuring that power consumption will not exceed a threshold.  The predictable power consumption has value because it provides data center operators a ceiling in power consumption.  Having this predictable ceiling helps optimize the data center infrastructure and reduce stranded power.  Stranded power refers to a power allocation that needs to be there even if it's only for occasional use.

The performance impact can vary from zero when Node Manager is used as a guardrail to a percentage equal to the number of CPU cycles lost due to power capping when Node Manager is applied at 100% utilization.  When applied during normal operating conditions, the loss of performance is smaller than the number of cycles lost to power capping implies because the OS usually compensates for the slowdown.  If the end user is willing to re-prioritize application processes, under some circumstances it is possible to bring performance back to the uncapped level or even beyond.

Power capping is attained through voltage and frequency scaling.  Power consumed by a CPU is proportional to frequency and to the square of the voltage applied to the CPU.  This is done in discrete steps (“P-states” as defined by the ACPI standard. 

The highest performing P-states are also the most energetic.  Starting from a fully loaded CPU and the highest P state, the DBS assigns lower energy P-states as workload is reduced utilizing the Intel(r) SpeedStep technology.  An additional dip takes place as idle is reached as unused logical units in the CPU are switched off automatically.

Node Manager allows manipulating the P-states under program control instead of autonomously as under SpeedStep.  Since the CPU is running slower, this has the effect of potentially removing some of the cycles that otherwise could be used by applications, but reality is more nuanced. 

At high workloads, most CPU cycles are dedicated to running the application.  Hence, if power capping is applied, a reduction in CPU speed will yield and almost one-to-one reduction in application performance.

At the other end of the curve, if the CPU is idling and power consumption is already at the floor level.  An application of Node Manager will not yield any additional power consumption reduction.

The more interesting cases take place in the mid-range band of utilization, when the utilization rate is between 10 and 60 percent, depending on the application (40 to 80 percent in the BMW case studybelow.)  Taking utilization beyond the upper limit is not desirable because the system would have difficulty in taking up load spikes and hence response times may deteriorate to unacceptable levels. 

We have run a number of applications in the lab and observed their performance behavior under Node Manager.  Surprisingly, the performance loss is less than frequency scaling would indicate.  One possible explanation is that when utilization is in the mid-range, there are idle cycles available.  The OS compensates to some extent for the slower cycles by increasing the time slices to the applications, using up otherwise idle cycles, to the point that the apparent performance of the application is little changed.  The application may need to be throttled up to re-gain the pre-capping throughput.

One way to verify this behavior is to observe that CPU utilization has indeed gone up in a power capped regime.  BMW conducted a proof of concept with Intel precisely to explore the boundaries of the extent to which that application could be re-prioritized under power capping to restore the original, uncapped throughput.  TANSTAAFL still applies here.  The application is still yielding the same performance under power capping.  However, since there are fewer cycles available due to frequency scaling, there will be less headroom should the workload pick up suddenly.  In this case the remedy is simply to remove the cap.  The management software needs to be aware of these circumstances and initiate the appropriate action.

The experiments in this proof of concept involved an application mix used at a BMW site.  In the first series of experiments we plotted power consumption against CPU utilization by throttling the workload up and down, shown in red.

In the second series, shown in green, for each dot in the original curve we apply an initial power cap.  This yields a performance reduction.  The workload is throttled up until the uncapped performance is restored.  This process is repeated with increasingly aggressive power policy caps until the original performance cannot be reached. The new system power consumption without impacting system performance is shown plotted in green.  The difference between the red and green curves represents the range of capping applicable while maintaining the original throughput level.  The execution and running at the green level yields the same uncapped system performance. However, since idle cycles have been removed, there is no margin left to pick up extra workload.  Should it happen, performance indicators will deteriorate very quickly.

Under the circumstances described above, the system was able to deliver the same throughput at a lower power level.  There was no compromise in performance.  The tradeoff is in the form of diminished headroom in case the workload picks up.  The system operator or management software have the option to remove this cap immediately should this headroom be needed.

Are your “stuck at the desktop?”   A May 2008 study from the Council on Competitiveness and IDC identifies the barriers large and small firms face in moving from desktop computers to High Performance Computing (HPC) servers.  

Among the study findings¹, most firms:

-          Reveal that they have important problems they cannot solve on their desktop systems

-          Face three major barriers to adoption:  lack of application software, lack of sufficient talent, and cost constraints

As a scientist, an engineer, or an analyst: Have you outgrown your desktop?  What kind of new innovation or capabilities would the use of a HPC cluster give you?  Imagine the capability to analyze data and gain more insight faster, or the ability to virtually prototype your ideas product more efficiently and cost effectively, or perhaps analyze, model, or simulate larger problems.

Few OEM products aimed at the personal or “desk-side” segment are making easier for end users to adopt HPC and help to overcome some of the barriers to adoption:  the Cray* CX1*, SGI* Octane* III, and HP’s  CP Workgroup System.  These products are aimed at addressing the needs of the entry level HPC market and the workstation users that have outgrown their desktops.  Both the Cray CX1 and SGI Octane III systems are Intel® Cluster Ready (ICR) program certified which means that Intel has worked with the hardware, system, and application vendors to ensure your configuration has been pre-tested for interoperability, so you can deploy with confidence.  ICR helps to reduce TCO by making sure the components keep working together over the cluster’s lifetime, to increase availability and save time for IT departments.

So if your IT department cannot buy you full blown super computer, ask them for a personal super computer.

¹ Source: Reveal.  Council on Competitiveness and USC-ISI Broad Study of Desktop Technical Computing End Users and HPC, May 2008 (http://www.compete.org/publications/detail/420/reveal/)

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others

I’d like to introduce myself as a product line manager at Intel who has spent almost a decade ensuring we are creating the best servers to solve small business challenges. Part of my role is to influence future generation products and I’d like to learn more about your challenges, needs and desires so I can ensure we address them in our next generation products.

Here is a story I have heard in the past: “Ah geez, What Now? A customer just called to tell me they tried to enter an online order for my product and my web site is nowhere to be found.  I am lucky they called, but so much for spending a Saturday at my kid’s baseball tournament! Now I need to drive an hour to my downtown office to restart and possibly fumble with my server.  You would think that the desktop system that I am using as a server would just work so I can spend my free time with my family and my work time growing my business.”  

I can’t count the number of times I have heard a similar story from customers and colleagues that are trying to grow a small business, manage their own computers and have a personal life.  The answer to their problem is simple, buy a real server based on Intel®Xeon® Processors that is designed to keep your business running 24/7.   Our latest Xeon processors and chipsets are not only validated to run 24/7, but include features such as support for error correcting code memory and RAID for server operating systems that ensure dependability and differentiate a real server from desktop system used as a server.  However, a small business should not care about all this technical jargon.   I believe they only care that their server runs 24/7 without failure, enabling them to focus on business growth and life.

What are your small business challenges?  I’m all ears.

Three short years ago, this would have taken 32 Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest) servers, accounting for 64U of rack space... this pic is from the upcoming Xeon MP (Beckton) platform with Nehalem-EX processors that many of you have seen at IDF 2009.  This server only takes 3U of rack space... less than 5% of the space of what it could replace.

Sometimes you see a screenshot and it just makes your jaw drop...

Just to give a comparison of CPU density... here's a diagram showing the comparison of 3 year old technology compared to the upcoming Nehalem-EX.  If each of those 32 old servers burns 400W of power - that's 12.8 kilowatts - compared to one server, burning less than 1kW.

What's even more amazing, is that some design wins are based on a 1U server with the same cpu footprint - that's AWESOME!

What are your thoughts on these upcoming multi-core technology improvements?