TAIPEI June 4 2012
Organizer: Industrial Technology Research institute (ITRI)
Invited Partners: Gartner, DELL, Canonical, VOSYS, Intel, AMD, Calxeda, Applied Micro, Linaro, Verizon, Marvell
Next low power servers architectures and implementations are presented; they are meant as a disruptive necessary trend. With vIrtical we will have a direct impact on those implementations. Among the most interesting presentations:
- Canonical: is becoming an important pivotal actor for low power data centers ecosystem around ARM technologies. The ecosystem includes Open Stack, JuJu which is a sort of server hw abstraction layer, hadoop etc. The new low power concept is getting away from considering the servers as a collection of individual nodes, and rather pushing for an abstraction of heterogeneous hardware resources (JuJu technology). Mark Schuttleworth, founder of Canonical, surprised the audience by showing up at the workshop.
- Calxeda: The paradigm is shifting from traditional server architectures to SOC (Server-On-Chip) under the leitmotif of transposing the mobile low power technology into the data centers market place. The current silicon implementation of the Calxeda SoC is based on Cortex-A9 4-cores, embedding all the additional server circuitry. A board including 4 servers has been presented, claimed a total power consumption (including RAM) of 20W (5W in idle mode). Calxeda is Interested in what VOSYS presented related to KVM-on-ARM under vIrtical architecture. A15-based SoC expected in 2013.
- Applied Micro: presented the x-gene v8-based architecture Server on Chip, currently implemented as an FPGA. Silicon expected by e/o 2012.
- ITRI: demonstrated a KVM-On-ARM CortexA9 implementation over ARMADA-XP Marvel hw Platform. ITRI shows an high interest in further discussing the KVM-On-ARM implementation of VOSYS within Virtical project.
- VOSYS: presented the current KVM-On-ARM Cortex A15 implementation on FastModels within the vIrtical project. Canonical specifically was interested in learning that the implementation is open source.
