Buyers' Guide
Xeon Buyer's Guide: The demand for computing power
Published: 18 Sep 2008, 02:13pm
One thing is dependable in IT - a never-ending growth in the sheer computing power businesses need to stay ahead of the game. Faster processors help them calculate financial risks faster, pinpoint oil wells more precisely than the competition… and create bigger and better super-villains (more of which later).
All industries now have an insatiable, ever-growing need for processing power in their data-centres, to crunch the numbers that allow them to get even a small but vital advantage over their competitors.
"Companies have found that real time analysis correlates to a direct impact on their bottom line and their competitiveness in the market," says Intel solutions architect William Crowe. "IT has a direct downstream impact on their business - and that is true in all sorts of industries. There is an enormous focus on this right now."
In the financial services industry, for example, companies have moved from calculating risk exposures every week, to working them out daily and are now changing to a real time model, where risk is calculated for every transaction as it is set up.
"This capability is enabled through investment in compute capacity and provides a major competitive benefit to their business," says Crowe.
The same is true in the oil and gas industry. Here, an investment in computing power allows companies to perform far more detailed and granular seismic modelling. This enables them to become much more efficient in extracting increased value from their oil field assets.
Historically, oil extraction companies have had to dig test wells, examine data, and act on their best guesses. With heavy investment in computer measurement, they can now make their decisions on results from seismic probes, and get a higher strike rate.
They can also use more sophisticated computer modelling from existing data, and go back to old wells to extract the oil they may have missed first time round.
In almost every industry, the ability to calculate risks, yields and demands has a direct impact on the bottom line and the company's competitiveness – and the best way to improve this capacity is to upgrade the existing data centre using modern hardware.
Sony Pictures, for instance, needs massive computer processing power to create films such as Spiderman 3 and Beowulf, which rely heavily on detailed digital effects.
“Currently our data farm includes about 8,500 cores,” says Bill Villarreal, VP of technology at Sony Pictures Imageworks. “It’s a massive infrastructure, but we need it to produce those effects.”
Faster systems
Modern hardware systems work faster, and there are two fundamental reasons.
Processors are made using smaller microscopic components. This means more logic on a chip, and faster processing. This is the basic logic behind Gordon Moore's famous Law, which predicts the number of transistors – and therefore processing power - on a chip will double about every two years.
The latest move, from 65 nanometer to 45 nanometer manufacturing, has kept the chips on that track. Servers made using 45 nanometer processors have been shown to complete tasks 14 per cent faster, while using up to 29 per cent less power, than their 65 nanometer predecessors.
When fabrication methods allow them more components, chip designers use those components to improve the overall design. Newer processors can address more memory, switch more quickly between processes and communicate more quickly.
But the biggest change has been putting several processing units on one chip, to make multi-core processors. Intel introduced multi-core processors in 2006 and, since then, processor power has increased six fold, as measured by the SPECint benchmark.
"The increase in processing power is a hockey stick curve," says Crowe.
During this same time period, the actual server energy consumption has remained flat - if anything decreasing slightly. These two dynamics of multi-core processors and energy consumption coupled together have enabled enormous gains in energy efficiency in the data centre.
Intel Xeon processors have expanded to include devices such as the quad-core 7300 series and, launched in September 2008, the 7400. Code-named "Dunnington", the 7400 has six cores per socket, and four sockets per server.
Riding the blade server wave
Intel’s advanced 45 nanometer manufacturing process has also enabled it to develop a range of lower voltage Xeon processor, which only consumes 50w per CPU with no loss of performance. Devices such as the L5420, for example, can then become attractive to high dense blade server deployments, or in environments that are particularly power sensitive.
Multi-core processors provide multiple CPUs within a chip and servers increasingly use multiple processors, with blades allowing up to 128 multi-core processors in a rack, providing a resource onto which multiple applications can be consolidated.
Since its inception, the Intel Xeon range has been optimised for multi-processing performance, including features such as larger caches and faster I/O performance than their desktop counterparts. Intel Xeon processors have therefore been able to ride the wave of blade servers in the data centres.
The increase in performance coincides with the increasing demands discussed above, so users are now able to upgrade their existing data centres and meet the new requirements without having to build new server rooms.
Creating super-villains
Sony Pictures Imageworks, for example, embarked on a server upgrade in 2006 to meet the needs of the movies it was working on. The team working on Spiderman 3 needed to create longer shots featuring the Sandman - a character made of individual sand grains.
“Sandman posed some unique challenges for us,” says Villarreal. “The effects we created were very processor-intensive. As the film progressed, the director envisioned even longer shots with that character. Those creative and technical demands required more resources, and we had to figure out a way to accommodate those demands while simultaneously supporting other projects in production. To make all of our deadlines, it was clear that we needed to augment our data farm.”
To work on effects for three films simultaneously, the company bought 3,000 more cores. This would have been impossible with earlier technology, but multi-core, multi-processor systems allowed Sony Pictures to fit those cores in just seven server racks.
Not many IT managers are instrumental in building a better super-villain, but in more prosaic walks of life faster processing is still needed to get a head start on the competition. It looks like this year's faster Intel Xeon processors will arrive not a moment too soon.
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