SeaMicro Lifts Veil on 512 core Atom Server

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Remember our post from last week on Eadline’s musing about Atom clusters?  Well, this week we have a press release to back it up [we’re cool like that].  The venture-backed startup SeaMicro today unveiled initial details on what it calls “data center appliances.”  The SM10000 will be the first product released from the company and it looks to be a doozy.

The SM10000 is essentially a 10U chassis that integrates modular compute, networking and management interfaces.  However, the big news comes in what they’re packing inside.  512 cores of 1.6Ghz Intel Atom CPUs in that seemingly small chassis.  Great googly moogly!

The technical spec sheets quotes racking up to four chassis in a 42U rack.  That’s 2048 cores in a rack at a fraction of the power required for their big brother Xeon’s. A few more technical details:

  • 512 cores per chassis, arranged in 8 cores per card [Intel Z530: 1.6GHz, Single Core, Dual Thread]
  • up to 64 hot-serviceable cards per system
  • 1GB or 2GB of SODIMM memory per processor
  • Each card can handle up to 8 ports of Ethernet [RJ-45, Gigabit].
  • 64 x 2.5″ hard disks: spinning or SSD
  • 3+1 100-240V single phase redundant power supplies

The entire system is front-to-rear air cooled with the standard array of redundant fans.  They don’t quote exacting power requirements, but 3×240 volt single phase connections shouldn’t be difficult to feed [they don’t quote the current rating].

The machine is specifically built to service dense data center and web environments with efficient server engines.  Its clear from the “Load Balancer” they quote as a part of the infrastructure, that this is not a system built to run near the lunatic fringe.  However, this is the first system.  There is no reason these folks could pick up a niche corner of low-power HPC.

Quoting their product docs, SeaMicro seems to have the first “Rack-in-a-Box”.  Clever.  Check em’ out here.