LSI to demo industry's first single-root I/O virtualization solution at IDF 2009

BANGALORE, INDIA: LSI Corp., in collaboration with Intel and Red Hat, today announced the industry's first demonstration of a single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) capable storage controller.

The controller, using Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d) and PCI-SIG SR-IOV technology, enables virtual servers in direct-attached storage (DAS) environments to share a storage controller, delivering increased system performance, efficiency and scalability.

The companies will demonstrate the solution in the Intel booth (booth #517) at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), September 22-24, at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco, Calif.

"The first wave of virtualization has been focused on consolidating physical servers and delivering the economic benefits of increased server utilization," said Luca Bert, director of DAS RAID Architecture and Strategic Planning, LSI. "The next wave will focus on increasing overall system and storage performance, and hardware-based SR-IOV helps achieve that goal."

The technology demonstration will feature an Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series based server, the Red Hat virtualization solution and an LSI MegaRAID storage controller running a performance benchmark on both conventional and SR-IOV based systems.

The demo will showcase how the MegaRAID controller using Intel VT-d and SR-IOV technology is able to deliver SAN-like capabilities in a low-cost virtualized, direct-attached storage environment. Intel VT-d is part of Intel’s core logic that accelerates I/O virtualization by remapping I/O DMA transfers and device generated interrupts.

“Utilizing Intel VT-d with Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based platforms and SR-IOV RAID controllers helps to overcome the performance bottlenecks of virtualized solutions by shifting the burden from software implementations of hypervisors to the platform and the storage controller,” said Jim Pappas, Director Industry Initiatives at Intel. “Intel is excited about the overall performance improvements and data center cost savings that Intel VT-d and PCI-SIG SR-IOV solutions can deliver to our customers.”

Based on industry-standard I/O technology specifications developed by PCI-SIG, SR-IOV enables a single physical instance of the storage controller to appear as a number of virtual controllers. This allows multiple operating systems running simultaneously within a single computer to natively share PCI Express devices, resulting in dramatically increased server efficiency, improved system performance and more finely-tuned quality of service (QoS) and data security.

"Optimal virtualization solutions include consolidated storage and rapid, secure provisioning of storage. A hardware SR-IOV capable solution provides the performance, security and flexibility for data center architects to reduce their complexity and costs. This is the type of standards-based innovation that we expect from using Red Hat virtualization technology in collaboration with LSI and Intel,” said Navin Thadani, senior director, Virtualization Business at Red Hat.

Linux OS market grows in 2008, long term prospects remain good: IDC

FRAMINGHAM, USA: A recent IDC study reveals that worldwide revenue from Linux operating system software grew by 23.4 percent from 2007 to 2008, and that growth will be followed by a 2008-2013 CAGR of 16.9 percent. With this growth, worldwide Linux operating systems revenue will cross $1 billion for the first time in 2012, growing to $1.2 billion by 2013.

By comparison, Linux server operating system subscriptions will exhibit a different profile, with a contraction of net new subscriptions expected in 2009, followed by a steady recovery through 2013.

Meanwhile, nonpaid Linux server operating system deployments are predicted to grow more quickly than new subscriptions through 2013, leading to a net increase of nonpaid Linux server operating systems deployed compared to total worldwide Linux server operating systems being placed into service.

The combined total of Linux server operating system subscriptions and nonpaid deployments is expected to show a 2008-2013 CAGR of 1.1 percent -- a low growth rate that is impacted significantly by the anticipated contraction in 2009.

IDC notes that this low growth rate of new deployment can be misleading, since growth of virtualized deployments will also be taking place aboard existing servers, a metric not directly considered in the predicted growth of net new subscriptions and deployments.

"The dynamics we are seeing here are fascinating. The convergence of the difficult economic conditions, the maturing of enterprise virtualization software, and the increasing use of replica copy deployments of Linux server operating systems is leading to a shift where the success of the market is increasingly defined by the installed base rather than by the number of brand new subscriptions or deployments being made,” said Al Gillen, program vice president, System Software at IDC. “This phenomenon is not unique to Linux –- as we see the same trend playing out with Windows server operating environments.”

Gillen adds, “We find that more customers are seeing nonpaid Linux as a viable solution for certain non-critical business needs, despite the lack of commercial applications and the potential support challenges that come with a non-commercially-supported distribution.”

Additional key findings include:
* The top revenue-producing vendors are Red Hat and Novell, which together account for 94.5 percent of worldwide Linux operating systems revenue in 2008.
^ In terms of new subscriptions of server operating environments, Red Hat and Novell accounted for 90 percent of worldwide Linux subscriptions in 2008.
* Nonpaid Linux server operating systems continues to increase in importance on the overall market dynamics, with nonpaid Linux server operating system deployments accounting for 43.3 percent of the worldwide total, up from 41.4 percent in 2007.

Developers, go parallel, or perish, says Intel

Parallelism or parallel computing involves the simultaneous use of more than one computer or processor to execute a program. Ideally, parallel processing makes a program run faster as there are more engines (CPUs) running it.

India has been slow off the blocks as far as parallelism is concerned. Intel is undertaking various programs to ensure that software developers in Inda keep pace with the latest developments.

Intel has been developing microprocessors for a long time. James Reinders, Chief Software Evangelist and Director of Intel Software Development Products, said: "You can double performance and reduce power. Power consumption in a microprocessor isn't something that the industry wants. The solution is to add cores."

There are bandwidth challenges with multicore. Intel will be adding QuickPath technology later this year. Providing point-to-point high-speed links to distributed shared memory, the Intel QuickPath technology unleashes the parallel processing performance of next-generation Intel 45nm microarchitectures (codenamed Nehalem and Tukwila). These microarchitectures, built from the ground up, will be the first to use the Intel QuickPath interconnect system and can see significant improvements in overall performance.

Reinders added, "We will also go to eight cores this year. We are looking at working with developers, so that they can take advantage of the cores. We need to look at how they can make parallel programming more flexible."

Tech challenges
Intel has been seeing pretty strong trends of users using parallelism or perhaps, trying to figure out how to use it best. The most active areas where parallelism is currently being used are in scientific applications and high-performance computing. The challenge is in the high-performance computing area, which involves lot of digital media content, said Reinders.

Indian scenario
Commenting on the scenario in India, Narendra Bhandari, Director, Intel Software and Solutions Group, said: "In India, we have been interacting with the telecom software companies. They have gone on to build parallelism, and actually delivered to local customers."

Reinders further added: "In Karnataka, we have interacted with an educational software company. We have tools that analyze what their programs do. Very quickly, they agree to discuss, and three to five weeks later, they are able to release new patches of their products."

Citing Tally as an example, Bhandari said: "We were able help Tally look at their applications. As the data load increases, challenges increase as well. They have since seen dramatic improvements in their applications. Yet another example is an animation company. We looked at their rendering. In two months or less, they saw the results. We showed them where the paradigm was shifting."

According to Intel, the interest levels in the adoption of the tools, as per the downloads and sales, etc., has gone up from 3x to 5x. "Traffic is quite high on our software network portal. This is the traffic to the geeky portion of Intel. All of these trends indicate that the awareness regarding parallelism has been very good in India," added Reinders.

Two of Intel's customers have applauded the company for its good work in parallelism -- the Institute of Mathematical Sciences of India (IMSI) in Chennai and Philips Medical.

Training programs
Intel launched a University program two years ago (Go Parallel or Perish). As of the end of 2007, 407 institutions globally have signed up. About 200 of these are from India. According to Reinders, most of the professors that Intel meets do touch upon parallelism in their classes. "We've also seen improvements at the UG level."

Bhandari added that Intel has a generation of programmers who have written code with non-parallel environments. "Parallelism skill is now going to be critical. The curriculum changes at institutes do not happen overnight. However, IIT-Kanpur built a curriculum two years ago and open sourced it," he pointed out. "We also talked to NIIT. We introduced parallelism in their curriculum. This was 18 months ago. Elements of our courses are also going on at G-NIIT. The NIITs have large scale and scope," he added.

Open Source
The fact that Intel does a lot of work on open source is perhaps, not well publicized. Reinders noted: "We do a lot of work in Open Source, and are right behind IBM and Red Hat. Linux eats up more power. The impact is the same on laptops and servers. We came up with seven different patches. Cutting power consumption on Linux devices is something that Intel is good at."

Intel also does a lot of seminars and other software partner programs. Reinders said: "Our focus is more toward the developer community. DRDO and BHEL are some of the customers in India who have benefited from our software development."

Three programmer challenges
According to Intel, programmers have three immediate challenges with parallelism: scalability, correctness and maiintainability. The rules of the thumb, as outlined by Intel are:

• Think parallel.
• Program using abstraction.
• Program in tasks (chores), not threads (cores).
• Design with the option to turn concurrency off.
• Avoid using locks.
• Use tools and libraries designed to help with concurrency.
• Use scalable memory allocators.
• Design to scale through increased workloads.

Parallelism offers new doors. Creativity is required to open these new doors. Developers would do well to look for these doors. Without any doubt, parallelism is central to Intel's products. Multi-core needs parallel applications. Therefore, developers need to learn to either think and go or be parallel, or perish!