Computer Hardware

Focus Items

Design systems that meet business needs

Hardware industry trends Problems

Legacy hardware (and software) Dealing with growth

Improving fault tolerance

Terms (Speed)

Microsecond - 1/1000 second Millisecond – 1/1,000,000 second Nanosecond – 1/1,000,000,000 second Picosecond – 1/1,000,000,000,000

second

Teraflop – Trillion (1,000,000,000,000) floating point operations per second

Terms (Storage)

1,000 bytes – Kilobyte 1,000,000 bytes – Megabyte 1,000,000,000 bytes – Gigabyte 1,000,000,000,000 bytes – Terabtye 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes =

Petabyte

Terms (CPU) (1)

Central Processing Unit (CPU) Many machines have multiple CPUs Servers scale from 1-256 processors Many CPUs are designed to support

virtualization

Processor speed Measured in GHz. A measure of the internal clock

Terms (CPU) (Illustration)

Terms (CPU) (2)

Most machines have multiple cores A “core” is a separate work engine

within the cpu

Terms (Cache) (Memory)

CACHE – Memory directly connected to the CPU Fast

Memory (Primary storage) Volatile storage to store data Not all memory is the same

Some provides error correction Performance differences Density

Terms (Bus)

Bus Communicates from CPU to memory, disk,

network controllers, etc. Bus speed is an important consideration

Terms (Disk)

Disk (Secondary storage) Hard

ATA, SATA, SCSI, Optical

CD / DVD / Blu Ray Backup tape devices

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

Categories of Computers (lightweight devices)

“Lightweight devices” Network computers Special purpose transaction terminals

UPS / FedEx Browser-only devices (kiosks)

Categories of Computers (Information Appliances)

Information appliances Smart phone Tablets of all shapes and sizes

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 Multiple CPUs with multiple cores

Large Server (Example)

SPARK Enterprise M9000 64 processors / 4 cores per processor 4TB memory Storage measure in the pedabytes (NAS)

IBM Power 795 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

Power supplies / cooling / external media We buy blade computers that go into

the chassis Blades:

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) It’s really the software and not the

hardware We just cluster multiple computers

together Special purpose back ends

TeraData database servers Storage Tek disk and tape sub systems Storage Area Networks (SAN)

Video Technologies

LCD flat panels are have made tube technology obsolete Reduced power consumption

Refresh rate is an important consideration

Multiple monitor systems improve productivity

Improved glass substrate technology has allows LCDs to get larger and larger

Secondary Storage (Memory)

CPUs read and write data from primary storage (memory)

Memory keeps getting faster, cheaper, and bigger Cost is as low as $9.50 per GB At one time it was $10,000 or more per MB

Types RAM (There are many types of RAM) ROM

Secondary Storage (Disk)

Trends They are cheap commodity items

< $100.00 per terabyte Rated in mean time between failure

(MTBF) 100,000 to 1.5M hours is common

Multiple disks are connected to form disk subsystems

RAID

Redundant disk arrays supply fault tolerance

There are different types of RAID Level 1 uses separate disks (mirroring) Level 2 uses striping There are others

Example HP 3PAR StoreServ 10000 storage

Fault tolerant Up to 2.2 PB of storage

Secondary Storage (Magnetic Tape)

It’s still used for large archive sites Phone records, credit card records, and

other historical data Tapes are enclosed in tape robotic

sub systems We can store up to 75-100 PB HP StoreEver ESL G3 Up to 12,006 tape cartridges

Disk Storage Servers

Dell PowerVaults have up to 150 3TB drives

UP to the big EMC storage devices (3PB)

https://store.emc.com/Solve-For/STORAGE-PRODUCTS/VNX7500/p/VNX-7500-STOR-001-1Q13-0025

Secondary Storage (SAN)

We are really just making data available to many clients

Evolution Network Access Storage (NAS) put

storage on the network instead of a server

Storage Area Network (SAN) puts storage on it’s on it’s own ‘very fast’ network

2GB/Sec interconnect using Fibre channel

Printer Technology

Desktop laser printers offer low TCO High speed production printers

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 75ft long and 15ft 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 1000ft per minute Ink feeds from 275gal tanks

Printer Technology (3)

Printer Technology (4)

RFID Technology

These are tiny chips send or receive radio signals They are becoming an alternative to

bar codes Uses

It’s been proposed to put them in Euros Casinos are using them in high

denomination chips Wynn

Balance in Systems

The issue in configuring large systems is balance

Choosing the right system for the job Disk (IO) is often the bottleneck Bus Speed Memory shortfalls Network bandwith

Scalability in Systems

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 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 18,688 AMD Opteron 18,688 K20x GPUs

710TB 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