Calxeda's ARM server tested
by Johan De Gelas on March 12, 2013 7:14 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Arm
- Xeon
- Boston
- Calxeda
- server
- Enterprise CPUs
Benchmark Configuration
First of all, a big thanks to Wannes De Smet, who assisted me the benchmarks. Below you can read the configuration details of our "real servers". The Atom machines are a mix of systems. The Atom 230 is part of a 1U server featuring a Pegatron IPX7A-ION motherboard with 4GB of DDR2-667. The N450 is found inside an ASUS EeePC netbook, and the Atom N2800 is part of Intel's DN2800MT Marshalltown mainboard. The latter has 4GB of DDR3-1333 while the former only has 1GB of DDR2-667.
| Supermicro SYS-6027TR-D71FRF Xeon E5 server (2U Chassis) | |
| CPU |
Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2660 (2.2GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 95W) Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2650L (1.8GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 70W) |
| RAM | 64/128GB (8/16x8GB) DDR3-1600 Samsung M393B1K70DH0-CK0 |
| Motherboard | X9DRT-HIBFF |
| Chipset | Intel C600 |
| BIOS version | R 1.1a |
| PSU | PWS-1K28P-SQ 1280W 80 Plus Platinum |
The Xeon E5 CPUs have four memory channels per CPU and support DDR3-1600, and thus our dual CPU configuration gets eight DIMMs for maximum bandwidth. Each core supports Hyper-Threading, so we're looking at 16 cores with 32 threads.
| Boston Viridis Server | |
| CPU | 24x ECX-1000 4c Cortex-A9 1.4GHz |
| RAM | 24x Netlist 4GB (96GB) low-voltage ECC PC3L-10600W-9-10-ZZ DRAM |
| Motherboard | 6x EC-cards |
| Chipset | none |
| Firmware version | ECX-1000-v2.1.5 |
| PSU | SuperMicro PWS-704P-1R 750Watt |
Common Storage System
An iSCSI LIO Unified Target accesses a DataON DNS-1640 DAS. Inside the DAS we have set up eight Intel SSDSA2SH032G1GN (X25-E 32GB SLC) in RAID-0.
Software Configuration
The Xeon E5 server runs VMware ESXi 5.1. All vmdks use thick provisioning, independent, and persistent. The power policy is "Low Power". We chose the "Low Power" policy as this enables C-states while the impact on performance is minimal. All other systems use Ubuntu 12.10. The power management policy is "ondemand". This enables P-states on the Atom and Calxeda ECX-1000.
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JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Hmmm ... There is almost no info on how that hypervisor works. It is hard to imagine that kind of system would scale very well. How does it keep Cache coherent? Do you have info on that?timbuktu - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I can't speak directly to ScaleMP, but it looks similar to NUMALink.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMAlink
Reading through this article about Calxedas, great job BTW, I couldn't help but think about the old SGI hardware that seemed pretty similar with MIPs (and later Itanium) processors connected through a switch with NUMALink. I haven't played with NUMALink directly in almost a decade, but back then cheaper Altix slabs were ring topology while higher end hardware was switched. In the end though, you could put together a bunch of 1U racks together and have a single system image. Like you mentioned though, cache coherency was exceptionally important. Since we have a uv here, I can point you to the documentation for that box.
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc...
Everything old is new again, I suppose. Well, except NUMAlink never went away. =D
Tunrip - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I'd be interested in knowing how the Xeon compared if you did the same test without the virtual machines.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
The website won't scale to 32 logical cores I am afraid... but we can try to see how far we can getColin1497 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
A better question might be "is 24 VM's a logical number to use?" Would more or fewer VM's work better? The appearance is that you have 24VM's because you have 24 ARM nodes?duploxxx - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
very interesting, loved reading it. But although early in the ball game I do think there are other way better solutions in the pipe-line from the big OEM:HP Moonshot
http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Isn't remarkable how PR people manage to fill so many pages with "extreme" and "the future" without telling anything. Frustation became even higher when I clicked "get the facts" page. That is more like "You are not getting any facts at all".DuckieHo - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Since these are set up as webservers, what's the power consumption at say 20-40% load? Usually there is some load instead of completely idle.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
Good suggestion... you'll like to see a step by step power measurement like SpecPower right? Let me try that.DanNeely - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link
I'd be interested in seeing where, and what happens when you start pushing single chips to and slightly beyond their limits. Calxeda's hardware's proved competitive on a very friendly workload (which I didn't really expect would happen until their A15 product); but in the real world a set of small websites are unlikely to all have equal load levels. Virtual servers on larger CPUs should give more headroom for load spikes; so knowing what the limits on Calxeda's hardware are strikes me as fairly important.