Why Choose vSMP Foundation Standalone?

Higher-Performance, Lower-Costs

vSMP Foundation Standalone fuses best-available processors with the scalable memory bandwidth benefits of ScaleMP's vSMP architecture. It provides an alternative solution to traditional multiprocessor systems, or a way to reduce cluster complexity. vSMP Foundation Standalone leverages 2- and 4- socket volume systems to create a virtual SMP resulting in superior performance, significant cost savings, configuration flexibilities, as well as space and power efficiencies. It provides the following features and benefits:

• Large memory resource, which enables larger workloads that cannot be run otherwise, and offers an alternative to costly and proprietary RISC systems
• Shared memory coupled with high-core count, which allow threaded applications to scale
• Ease of use with a single system and single operating system to manage, by offering an alternative to entry-level clusters

For discrete server systems

x86 systems with 4 to 8 sockets are used when the processing power, memory or I/O resources of dual-socket x86 systems are insufficient. However, today's 4 to 8 socket x86 systems do not provide the incremental performance gain compared to dual-socket x86 systems. In addition, on a per socket basis, these systems are more expensive and have lower compute density as well as higher power consumption, compared to dual-socket systems.

vSMP Foundation Standalone uses dual-socket systems to provide linear performance scaling and best of breed density and power consumption - at dual-socket system price points. In addition, 4 socket systems can be aggregated to create a cost-effective, high-performance 8 socket system.

For blade-server systems

Enterprise-class blade-server systems are designed to provide high-density coupled with great power efficiency. However, as these systems include many blade-servers, the management costs associated with these platforms is quite high – as they require managing an Operating System for each blade, replicating application and content, setting up a cluster file-system. These blade-servers are also limited in the memory footprint per blade – due to the form factor limitation of blade servers.

vSMP Foundation Standalone aggregates multiple blade-servers into one virtual system providing large memory footprint and a single point of management. System size and configurations vary depending on the specific blade platform. Up to 16 blades-servers supporting a total of 4 to 32 processors (128 cores) and up to 1 TB of memory are supported.

Aggregate and Scale

vSMP Foundation Standalone utilizes two-socket Intel Xeon systems to enable a high- performance virtual SMP by coupling vSMP architecture with Intel's Core microarchitecture. vSMP Foundation Standalone is provided on vSMP Foundation Device which plugs into each system USB port and requires these systems to be connected using InfiniBand. The resulting virtual SMP offer up to 128 processing cores, up to 1 TB of shared memory, the industry's highest processor performance and memory bandwidth, as well as lowest footprint and power consumption.

vSMP Foundation Standalone provides configuration flexibility that addresses different end user and applications requirements. vSMP Foundation Standalone can be used to create solutions with different characteristics:

• Compute-intensive platform: for applications that have been parallelized to take advantage of multi-processor systems. vSMP Foundation Standalone provides high memory bandwidth by utilizing the memory controllers of each system, guaranteeing each of the cores in the system the highest memory bandwidth possible which will result in overall high-performance.
  With discrete server systems, vSMP Foundation Standalone provides a virtual SMP with 4 to 8 sockets. Using 45-nanometer Intel Xeon processors and Intel 5400 chipset, vSMP Foundation Standalone delivers up to 60% better performance compared to four-socket AMD systems, 40% cost savings compared to such systems as well as significant footprint and power consumption advantages.
• Large memory platform: for large memory applications that do not require high-core-count, vSMP Foundation Standalone can use multiple systems fully-loaded with memory and running only one processor per system. The flexibility of vSMP Foundation Standalone further allows for a disparate configuration whereby one system is populated with a fast processor, and each of the other systems with a low-speed (and low-cost) processor. In such configurations, vSMP Foundation Standalone will present to the operating system the aggregated boards memory with only one processor (the faster). Using this configuration provides 50% to 90% cost and power saving at the processor level compared to multi-processor systems.

Simplify and Save

vSMP Foundation Standalone requires no customization. It provides end-users the ability to double the capabilities of existing 2 and 4 socket systems – just by adding an additional system. It also simplifies a blade-server system by spanning single Operating System across the entire blade-server chassis, providing a single point of management, higher utilization and I/O sharing. vSMP Foundation Standalone does not require operating system reinstallation or configuration and does not require any application modification. vSMP Foundation Standalone is installable with less than 15 minutes of downtime.

vSMP Foundation Standalone is available from select resellers worldwide.
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To access the whitepaper: The Versatile SMP™ (vSMP) Architecture and Solutions Based on vSMP Foundation™, click here.