Facebook's "Open Compute" Server tested
by Johan De Gelas on November 3, 2011 12:00 AM ESTIntroducing Our Open Virtualization Benchmark
vApus Mark II has been our own virtualization benchmark suite that tests how well servers cope with virtualizing "heavy duty applications". We explained the benchmark methodology here. The beauty of vApus Mark II is that:
- We test with real-world applications used in enterprises all over the world
- We can measure response times
- It can scale from 8 to 80 thread servers
- It is lightweight on the client side: one humble client is enough to bring the most massive server to its knees. For a virtualizated server or cluster, you only need a few clients.
There is one big disadvantage, however: the OLAP and web applications are the intellectual property of several software vendors, so we can't let third parties verify our tests. To deal with this, the Sizing Servers Lab developed a new benchmark, called vApus For Open Source workloads, in short vApus FOS.
vApus FOS uses a similar methodology as vApus Mark II with "tiles". The exact software configuration may still change a bit as we tested with the 0.9 version. One vApus FOS 0.9 tile uses four different VMs, consisting of:
- A PhpBB (Apache2, MySQL) website with one virtual CPU and 1GB RAM. The website uses about 8GB of disk space. We simulate up to 50 concurrent uses with press keys every 0.6 to 2.4 s.
- The same VM but with two vCPUs.
- An OLAP MySQL database that is used by an online webshop. The VM gets two vCPUs and 1GB RAM. The database is about 1GB, with up to 500 connections active.
- Last but not least: the Zimbra VM. VMware's open source groupware offering is by far the most I/O intensive VM. This VM gets two vCPUs and 2GB RAM, with up to 100 concurrent users active.
All VMs are based on minimal CentOS 5.6 with VMware Tools installed. vApus FOS can also be run on different hypervisors: we already tried using KVM, but encountered a lot of KVM specific problems.
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JohanAnandtech - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
It is an ATI ES 1000, that is a server/thin client chip. That chip is only 2D. I can not find the power specs, but considering that the chip does not even need a heatsink, I think this chip consumes maybe 1W in idle.mczak - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
ES 1000 is almost the same as radeon 7000/ve (no that's not HD 7000...) (some time in the past you could even force 3d in linux with the open-source driver though it usually did not work). The chip also has dedicated ram chip (though only 16bit wide memory interface) and I'm not sure how good the powersaving methods of it are (probably not downclocking but supporting clock gating) - not sure if it fits into 1W at idle (but certainly shouldn't be much more).JohanAnandtech - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
I can not find any good tech resources on the chip, but I can imagine that AMD/ATI have shrunk the chip since it's appearance in 2005. If not, and the chip does consume quite a bit, it is a bit disappointing that server vendors still use it as the videochip is used very rarely. You don't need a videochip for RDP for example.mczak - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
I think the possibility of this chip being shrunk since 2005 is 0%. The other question is if it was shrunk from rv100 or if it's actually the same - even if it was shrunk it probably was a well mature process like 130nm in 2005 otherwise it's 180nm.At 130nm (estimated below 20 million transistors) the die size would be very small already and probably wouldn't get any smaller due to i/o anyway. Most of the power draw might be due to i/o too so shrink wouldn't help there neither. It is possible though it's really below 1W (when idle).
Taft12 - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
A shrink WOULD allow production of many more units on each wafer. Since almost every server shipped needs an ES1000 chip, demand is consistently on the order of millions per year.mczak - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
There's a limit how much i/o you can have for a given die size (actually the limiting factor is not area but circumference so making it rectangular sort of helps). i/o pads apparently don't shrink well hence if your chip has to have some size because you've got too many i/o pads a shrink will do nothing but make it more expensive (since smaller process nodes are generally more expensive per area).Being i/o bound is quite possible for some chips though I don't know if this one really is - it's got at least display outputs, 16bit memory interface, 32bit pci interface and the required power/ground pads at least.
In any case even at 180nm the chip should be below 40mm² already hence the die size cost is probably quite low compared to packaging, cost of memory etc.
Penti - Saturday, November 5, 2011 - link
It's the integrated BMC/ILO solution which also includes a GPU that would use more power then the ES1000 any how. That is also what is lacking in the simple Google / Facebook compute-node setup. They don't need that kind off management and can handle that a node goes offline.haplo602 - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
It seems to me that the HP server is doing as well as the Facebook ones. Considering it has more featuers (remote management, integrated graphics) and a "common" PSU.JohanAnandtech - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
The HP does well. However, if you don't need integrated graphics and you hardly use the BMC at all, you still end up with a server that wastes power on features you hardly use.twhittet - Thursday, November 3, 2011 - link
I would assume cost is also a major factor. Why pay for so many features you don't need? Manufacturing costs should be lower if they actually build these in bulk.