Cavium, Inc., announced today that they are collaborating with Microsoft on evaluating and enabling a variety of cloud workloads running on Cavium's flagship ThunderX2 ARMv8-A Data Center processor for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The companies are also demonstrating web services on a version of Windows Server developed for Microsoft's internal use running cloud services workloads on ThunderX2. The server platform is based on Microsoft's Project Olympus - Microsoft's next generation open source hyperscale cloud hardware design.  The demonstrations will be shown at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit in San Jose on March 8 and 9, 2017 and are the result of an extensive long term collaboration between the two companies.

The Xen Project, hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8. The latest release focuses on advanced embedded use cases, features to support security-first environments and continued advancement in support of ARMv8-A based servers. Xen Project technology continues to see growth in these environments due to its flexibility, extensibility and customizability.

Grazed from Computing. Author: Graeme Burton.

ARM has revealed more details about the Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology it is developing for the ARMv8-A architecture that Fujitsu is planning to deploy in the Post-K supercomputer it is building for Japan's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. Detailed at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California today, SVE is capable of handling vectors from 128 to 2,048 bits in length, and is intended for supercomputer makers like Fujitsu to help them adopt ARM products and deploy them in the world's biggest and most powerful computers.

SVE is a flexible extension to the ARM instruction set that can shift vector calculations from software into hardware, with the scheduler arranging calculations depending on the hardware available. ARM engineers will, shortly, submit patches to the Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM compiler infrastructure project to support SVE auto-vectorisation...

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Adam Shah.

If you want to play with an ARM-based server, you can now apply to gain access to one online through the Linaro Developer Cloud. The cloud service was announced in March but has finally gone live. It's mainly targeted at developers who want to evaluate ARM servers.

The free service is one way to access ARM servers, which aren't widely available. Applications go through an approval process, and only those serious about programming for ARM servers will likely be approved...

Grazed from RiverBed. Author: Ian Downard.

Everyone loves talking about the weather but when it comes to taking the temperature of cloud infrastructures too many businesses throw caution to the wind. If your organization only recently started investigating cloud computing, you may not yet understand how much money you can save by provisioning just the right amount of compute power to meet demand.

In this blog, I'll talk about how cloud computing is creating new opportunities for application performance monitoring (APM). I'll give you three reasons why APM is something enterprises on the cloud can't live without and I'll talk specifically about how Riverbed is providing new APM capabilities for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform with SteelCentral AppInternals...

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Applied Micro Circuits and Canonical planned to demonstrate an OpenStack cloud running on a rack of ARM servers at the Computex tradeshow Friday in Taiwan. Major server manufacturers, including Dell and HP, and original design manufacturers from around the world, such as Quanta, Avnet, and Hyve, were expected to view the demonstration.

ARM is the chip used in many smartphones and mobile devices, and it's not usually associated with either enterprise data centers or cloud computing. But Applied Micro will show a rack of 14 servers based on its X-Gene server chip. They will be running Icehouse, the latest version of OpenStack, under Canonical's Ubuntu Linux...

Grazed from DataCenter Dynamics. Author: Editorial Staff.

Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine, is pushing the boundary of data center design with its cloud computing data centers. By integrating new hardware technologies including ARM-based servers, custom-designed all-in-one racks, 10Gb top-of-rack (TOR) switches and self-designed Solid State Disks (SSD), Baidu is boosting the performance of its cloud computing data centers. And it says it expects such efforts will lay the foundations for the technology benchmark for China’s internet data centers (IDC) of the future.

Self-designed 10Gb TOR switch

Baidu deployed a self-designed 10Gb TOR switch on over 5,000 servers in one of its cloud computing data centers. It is a server cluster which is believed to be the largest 10Gb TOR based cluster in the local market. By using self-designed hardware and software, an original design manufactured module, as well as DAC (direct attached cable), the cost of Baidu’s 10Gb TOR is almost the same as the commercial 1Gb TOR switches, Baidu said. Baidu started its research and development on the design of TOR switches in 2011 and launched first generation 10Gb TOR switch in 2012...

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O'Gara.

Something very exciting and provocative just happened to ARM and its server wannabe Calxeda. Univa, which can claim sprawling infrastructures, has ported its Grid Engine software to the Calxeda widgetry in support of its fancy high-brow dynamic workloads.

The stuff is in beta but Univa CEO Gary Tyreman says his customers are already testing it and that although the ARM chip is only 32-bit it can be used in production for integer apps, even Hadoop and protein folding, ahead of the eventual advent of the promised 64-bit ARM chip that will probably be out next year. They are trying to get ahead of the market, he says. They want to explore its potential and see what apps run best on the stuff...

Grazed from Sci-Tech-Today. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

AMD's new design initiative addresses the growing demand to deliver better performance-per-watt for dense cloud computing solutions. Unless Intel shifts its strategy, it's probable that AMD will be the only processor provider bridging the x86 and 64-bit ARM ecosystems in the data center and for cloud solutions.

Forbes is pondering whether AMD's move into ARM chips is positioning the company for a sale. Other media outlets are considering whether or not the move is setting the stage for heavy competition with Intel Relevant Products/Services on the server side...

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Changes brought about by the rise in cloud computing have had a huge impact on servers and server design, and could be the key factor in bringing ARM's low-power RISC chips into the datacentre. ARM believes that the rise of cloud companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon is bringing about a change in attitudes to processors that could make its chips relevant for these companies, posing a potential threat to Intel and AMD's server businesses.

Over the past few years, "the nature of servers has changed," ARM's general manager of its processor and physical IP divisions, Simon Segars told ZDNet this week. "It's really the growth in cloud [and] growth in companies doing web hosting [and] social sites. As that has grown the nature of servers has changed."...