A handful of former Nortel executives have launched a company they say combines telecom-class networking with high-performance computing to create a nearly unlimited pool of server resources that can grow and shrink in response to application demands.
Called Liquid Computing, the company is making a modular-server system that uses a high-bandwidth fiber interconnect to let users shift workloads and reconfigure systems on demand. The company is targeting high-performance computing customers in areas such as biosciences and government. The trials are scheduled to begin this summer.The offering is expected to be generally available next year.
The system is made up of a 36.75-inch-high chassis that holds 20 modules, including four dual-core Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors, memory and I/O, and plugs into a common midplane. Multiple chassis can be tied together via fiber-optic cables, and the initial release will scale to 12 chassis, or 960 processors, says Brian Hurley, Liquid Computing’s CEO.
The interconnect is Liquid Computing’s key feature. It is a combination of commodity components and proprietary devices that enable fiber-optic lines to have latency of “less than 2 microseconds from processor to processor” and throughput of up to 6G byte/sec, Hurley says. He stresses that the proprietary nature of the interconnect is “transparent” to applications. “It’s all standard interfaces,” he says.
“With a simple software command, we can configure the processors to look like a bunch of two-ways, a bunch of four-ways, a bunch of eight-ways, with any combination of memory and I/O that’s required by the application at that point,” Hurley says.
Analysts say the idea is similar to blade servers but takes things a step further.
“They’re including things such as broadband connectivity, as well as a little bit more advanced networking capabilities than your run-of-the-mill server blade,” says Alan Freedman, research manager of infrastructure hardware at IDC.
DigitalGlobe, a multimedia firm that sells high-resolution satellite images of Earth, says Liquid Computing will enable it to get more efficient use of data center resources.
Today, the Longmont, Colo., company has idle hardware standing by to provide the huge amount of computing power it needs for just 10 or 15 minutes every hour and a half – the time it takes for its satellite to circle the Earth.
“That’s what is so attractive about the Liquid system: First of all, to have that many processors in a single form or single platform and then to be able to dynamically allocate them to where the business needs them and then reallocate them to different tasks,” says Mark Hargrove, senior vice president of operations and CIO of DigitalGlobe.
The challenge for Liquid Computing will be convincing customers that what it is offering is better than grid or clustering products that major systems vendors such as IBM, HP, Sun and SGI offer, analysts say.
“They have to differentiate themselves from the major server vendors and networking companies, and show there is a difference and that people don’t need to buy disparate parts for the function they can provide in their integrated product offering,” Freedman says.
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