IBM / ASTRON DOME Project High-Performance, Energy-Efficient Microserver Andreas Doering, Francois Abel, Matteo Cossale, Stephan Paredes, Ronald Luijten

The DOME Project µServer

ASTRON, The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM collaborate Integration of an entire server node motherboard* into a single microchip except DRAM, in the DOME project to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale NOR-boot flash and power conversion logic. computer systems targeted for the international (SKA). This does NOT imply low performance! The SKA, upon completion in ca. 2024, will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. * no graphics It will be used to explore evolving galaxies, dark matter and even the very origins of the universe – the Big Bang – dating back more than 13 billion years. The SKA is expected to generate roughly 14 exabytes of raw data per day. In the DOME Project, the scientists investigate new technologies that will be required to read, store and analyze that data.

139 x 55 mm2 245 mm DOME µServer Motivation & Objectives 305 mm • Create the world’s highest-density 64-bit µ-server drawer – Useful to evaluate both SKA radio-astronomy and IBM future business – Platform for business analytics appliance pre-product research Compute node board Interfaces: – High energy efficiency / very low cost • USB (management) – Commodity components, HW + SW standards-based SKA (Square Kilometre Array) to measure Big Bang • 4 x 10 GbE – Leverage “free computing” paradigm • 2 x SATA – Enhance with “value add”: packaging, system • PCIe x 8 integration … • Most efficient cooling using IBM technology (ref: SuperMUC June 2012 TOP500 machine)

Start of End of Planned system: 2U rack unit Big Protons nucleosynthesis nucleo- Bang Inflation created Modern Universe through fusion synthesis • Must be true 64-bit to enable business applications 0 10-32s 10-6s 0.01s 3min 380’000 years 13.8 Billion years Picture source: NZZ march 2014 19” 2U chassis w/ combined cooling & power • Must run server class OS (SLES11 or RHEL6, or equivalent) 128 compute node boards • This is the DOME project capability demonstrator – not a product 1536 cores / 3072 threads 6 TB DRAM Demonstrated: 1.28 Tbps (@40 Gbps) • 2x better operations / Joule than Energy Optimized XEON ® • 40% better total performance than same XEON

Expected 2U unit total power: ~ 6 kW References and links: Connects to mains, rack-level water, 32x40 Gbps Ethernet • www.zurich..com/microserver Hot-water cooled for efficiency and density • Swissdutch.ch “Datacenter in a Box” • Twitter.com/#ronaldgadget Runs: • DB2, Fedora 64-bit, cloud computing applications CeBIT Demo April 2015 www.zurich.ibm.com/science-posters/ • Watson planned Live demo: SC15 submitted