HP ProLiant SL270s HP Project Moonshot and the Redstone Development Server Pla - Page 8

What are ARM processors and why use them? The vast majority of embedded and consumer devices today-for example, smart phones, tablets, ereaders, printers, and scanners-use processors based on ARM cores, which means they are plentiful and well understood by the engineering community. The ARM architecture uses a RISC instruction set, for which ARM Holdings and partners have developed a rich set of silicon available today. The vast and versatile ARM partner base builds highly optimized SoC components that combine right-sized performance with low power usage. The target applications for our extreme low-energy servers are highly parallel workloads that don't make effective use of all the CPU cycles available today in high-end processors. By moving to ARM processors for these application environments, we can achieve better effective performance per watt while using a simpler, more energy-efficient, and less expensive core. Simplifying the main CPU core frees up additional silicon resources: Our silicon partners can take the ARM processor architecture and design even more specialized SoC implementations around it. They can integrate other components such as memory or network controllers for deeper reductions of system cost and power for a particular application domain. Mobile and embedded platforms already have a long history of doing this. With Project Moonshot, we're driving these advantages into the server market. The simpler instruction set and aggressive low-power designs of ARM implementations give ARM cores an intrinsic energy and cost advantage compared to high-performance processors such as x86. Availability We will make limited quantities of the Redstone Development Server available to customers and partners participating in the HP Discovery lab. The servers will be available in the second half of 2012. Redstone software environment Many software vendors today offer robust software components for ARM processors, primarily in mobile applications and web serving. We plan to leverage this ecosystem and enhance it to address specific requirements of the hyperscale server market. This section briefly discusses the major software components and workloads that we plan to investigate with Redstone. Operating systems We are designing the Redstone Development Server initially to run on Canonical's Ubuntu and Red Hat's Fedora distributions. We will explore the use of other operating systems in the near future. What applications are appropriate? Moonshot platforms in general will be best suited for one or more of these application areas: • Simple content delivery-web front-end servers with relatively little request processing or with video servers fetching and shipping unmodified video • Large distributed memory caching-server clusters running software such as Memcached • Big-data applications-simple database searches on in-memory databases, scalable analytics, and MapReduce applications with lightweight CPU requirements These workloads and application types are common in the cloud and service provider environments today. They can operate as massively parallel scale-out applications and are constrained most often by I/O rather than by CPU or memory. This makes them ideal for Moonshot platforms. For the Redstone Development Server specifically, the web front-end applications are likely to be the most suitable. Most web developers use the open-source LAMP software stack (Linux OS, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and PHP/Python/PERL scripting) to build dynamic web sites and web servers. The LAMP 8