COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Project Moonshot paves the way to the future of extreme low-energy server technology to help you achieve energy, power and space savings you never imagined. Based on extreme low-energy server technology, the Project Moonshot infrastructure can enable you to share storage, networking, management, as well as power and cooling across thousands of servers. Unlike traditional infrastructure designs, Project Moonshot is designed to unlock the promise of extreme low-energy server technology by pooling resources in a highly-federated environment. The Redstone Server Development Platform (available in the first half of 2012) incorporates more than 2,800 servers in a single rack - reducing cabling, switching and use of peripheral devices to reduce complexity by up to 97 percent.

Project Moonshot addresses many extreme low-energy server technologies from CPUs to GPUs, Ethernet and InfiniBand networking, storage, and power and cooling. While ARM processors available today are still 32-bit, the recently announced ARM v8 architecture introduces a 64-bit instruction set which is expected to significantly expand ARM usage in servers. While ARM addresses performance/watt with a very low power socket (compared to traditional x86), GPUs provide an orthogonal performance/watt vector with a very high power socket footprint. Technologies such as Nvidia's Project Denver aim to marry ARM processors with GPUs and could significantly change the server GPU landscape as well. On the networking front, InfiniBand continues to lead the performance curve for applications requiring extreme low latency, but a host of new "merchant silicon" for 10G and 40G Ethernet switching are also entering this space and providing new alternatives for many HPC and other Hyperscale customers.

Hamilton will discuss how all of these technologies are impacting server designs over the coming years and paving the way for the future.