Computer Hardware Focus Items Design systems that

Computer Hardware

Focus Items Design systems that meet business needs ¡ Hardware industry trends ¡ Problems ¡ l l ¡ Legacy hardware (and software) Dealing with growth Improving fault tolerance

Terms (CPU) (1) ¡ Central Processing Unit (CPU) l l l ¡ Many machines have multiple CPUs Servers scale from 1 -256 processors Many CPUs are designed to support virtualization Processor speed l l Measured in GHz. A measure of the internal clock

Terms (CPU) (Illustration)

Terms (CPU) (2) ¡ Most machines have multiple cores l A “core” is a separate work engine within the cpu

Terms (Cache) (Memory) ¡ ¡ CACHE – Memory directly connected to the CPU l Fast Memory (Primary storage) l l Volatile storage to store data Not all memory is the same ¡ ¡ ¡ Some provides error correction Performance differences Density

Terms (Bus) ¡ Bus l l Communicates from CPU to memory, disk, network controllers, etc. Bus speed is an important consideration

Terms (Disk) ¡ Disk (Secondary storage) l Hard ¡ l l ATA, SCSI, Optical ¡ CD / DVD / Blu Ray Backup tape devices http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

Categories of Computers (lightweight devices) ¡ “Lightweight devices” l l Network computers Special purpose transaction terminals ¡ l UPS / Fed. Ex Browser-only devices (kiosks) Phones ¡ Tablets ¡

Categories of Computers (Desktop) Market is shrinking because of tablet / phone horsepower ¡ These are the engineering workstations of yesterday ¡

Categories of Computers (Servers) Oracle Sun / HP / IBM / Dell provide the lion’s share of todays servers ¡ Characterized by ¡ l Multiple CPUs with multiple cores

Large Server (Example) ¡ SPARK Enterprise M 9000 l l l ¡ 64 processors / 4 cores per processor 4 TB memory Storage measure in the pedabytes (NAS) IBM Power 795 l l l Up to 256 processor cores book “book” and up to 8 books 16 TB memory All for about $1 million

Larger Server (Illustration)

Categories of Computers (Blade) A computer within a computer ¡ We buy a “blade chassis” containing ¡ l Power supplies / cooling / external media We buy blade computers that go into the chassis ¡ Blades: ¡ l Reduce power consumption and maintenance costs

Blade (Illustration)

Categories of Computers (Mainframe) ¡ These are really just the IBM Z series and a few special purpose devices

Categories of Computers (Distributed Computing) ¡ (Distributed computing) l l ¡ It’s really the software and not the hardware We just cluster multiple computers together Special purpose back ends l l l Tera. Data database servers Storage Tek disk and tape sub systems Storage Area Networks (SAN)

Secondary Storage (Disk) ¡ Trends l They are cheap commodity items ¡ l Rated in mean time between failure (MTBF) ¡ l < $100. 00 per terabyte 100, 000 to 1. 5 M hours is common Multiple disks are connected to form disk subsystems

RAID ¡ ¡ Redundant disk arrays supply fault tolerance There are different types of RAID l l l ¡ Level 1 uses separate disks (mirroring) Level 2 uses striping There are others Example l HP 3 PAR Store. Serv 10000 storage ¡ Fault tolerant ¡ Up to 2. 2 PB of storage

Secondary Storage (Magnetic Tape) ¡ It’s still used for large archive sites l ¡ Phone records, credit card records, and other historical data Tapes are enclosed in tape robotic sub systems l l l We can store up to 75 -100 PB HP Store. Ever ESL G 3 Up to 12, 006 tape cartridges

Secondary Storage (SAN) We are really just making data available to many clients ¡ Evolution ¡ l l Network Access Storage (NAS) put storage on the network instead of a server Storage Area Network (SAN) puts storage on it’s own ‘very fast’ network ¡ 2 GB/Sec interconnect using Fibre channel

Printer Technology Desktop laser printers offer low TCO ¡ High speed production printers ¡ l l These compete against traditional offset presses Continuous roll input Up to 2500 pages per minute www. delphax. com

Printer Technology (2) ¡ ¡ ¡ Kodak example system: About 75 ft long and 15 ft tall Will print both sides at 2 up(2 different documents side by side) Ink jet printer - 12 print heads -- 8 nine inch heads and 4 four inch heads. Running at 1000 ft per minute Ink feeds from 275 gal tanks

Printer Technology (3)

Printer Technology (4)

Balance in Systems The issue in configuring large systems is balance ¡ Choosing the right system for the job ¡ l l Disk (IO) is often the bottleneck Bus Speed Memory shortfalls Network bandwith

Scalability in Systems must be able to grow with a business ¡ Expansion of an existing system by adding memory, disk or other components ¡ Expansion by adding additional servers to a cluster or server farm ¡

Server Farms ¡ Many servers interconnected together

Server Farms (Load Balancing) ¡ Load balancing servers l l l Dispatch request to the actual servers Monitor the health of the servers Monitor the load on the various servers

Titan ¡ Oak Ridge National Labs houses the “fastest” computer in the world

Titan 27, 000 trillion calculations / second (27 petaflops) ¡ 299, 008 CPU cores ¡ l l 18, 688 AMD Opteron 18, 688 K 20 x GPUs 710 TB of memory ¡ Cost of 97 million ¡

Fault Tolerance in Systems One server in a farm can fail leaving the others running ¡ Fault tolerant servers have multiple CPUs ¡ Failed memory will not cause a system to fail ¡ RAID allows disk failures without causing system failures ¡

Economic Decisions Single vendor solutions vs. multivendor solutions ¡ Lease VS. buy decisions ¡

Terms (Speed) Microsecond - 1/1000 second ¡ Millisecond – 1/1, 000 second ¡ Nanosecond – 1/1, 000, 000 second ¡ Picosecond – 1/1, 000, 000 second ¡ ¡ Teraflop – Trillion (1, 000, 000) floating point operations per second

Terms (Storage) 1, 000 bytes – Kilobyte ¡ 1, 000 bytes – Megabyte ¡ 1, 000, 000 bytes – Gigabyte ¡ 1, 000, 000 bytes – Terabtye ¡ 1, 000, 000 bytes = Petabyte ¡