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 (CPU) (1)  Central Processing Unit (CPU) Many machines have multiple CPUs Servers scale from 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

Categories of Computers (lightweight devices)  “Lightweight devices” Network computers Special purpose transaction terminals  UPS / FedEx 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 Multiple CPUs with multiple cores

Large Server (Example)  SPARK Enterprise M 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)

Secondary Storage (Disk)  Trends They are cheap commodity items  < $ 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 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 PB HP StoreEver ESL G3 Up to 12,006 tape cartridges

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

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)

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

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