
Online Labs – ARM servers in the cloud - Remiii
http://labs.online.net
======
spindritf
I haven't used Online.net in a while but they're on Twitter, on IRC, they have
a forum based on Discourse[1], now this. It's like a fresher OVH. French, too.

The servers have four logical processors like this

    
    
        processor       : 0
        model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
        Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee fpv3 tls idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae 
        CPU implementer : 0x56
        CPU architecture: 7
        CPU variant     : 0x2
        CPU part        : 0x584
        CPU revision    : 2
    

[1] [https://community.cloud.online.net/](https://community.cloud.online.net/)

~~~
Marat_Dukhan
Thanx for posting this info. The cpuinfo matches Marvell Armada XP.

~~~
spindritf
Oh, yeah, I forgot to append that

    
    
        Hardware	: Marvell Armada 370/XP (Device Tree)
        Revision	: 0000
        Serial	: 0000000000000000

------
hipaulshi

      free -m                                                                       
                   total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached                             
      Mem:          2020         97       1923          0          6         40                             
      -/+ buffers/cache:         49       1970                                                              
      Swap:            0          0          0
    

Server seems to be located in France

    
    
      {
        "as": "AS12876 ONLINE S.A.S.",
        "city": "",
        "country": "France",
        "countryCode": "FR",
        "isp": "Tiscali France",
        "lat": 48.86,
        "lon": 2.35,
        "org": "Tiscali France",
        "query": "212.47.232.90",
        "region": "",
        "regionName": "",
        "status": "success",
        "timezone": "Europe/Paris",
        "zip": ""
      }

------
twotwotwo
I think the big use case for ARM in datacenters, over the next few years, is
for servers whose CPU usage is very low today--they're consistently network-
bound or they just act as a relatively dumb interface to RAM or disk
(memcached, some distributed DBs, some dumb proxies). Baidu uses ARM for cloud
storage, Facebook used AMD servers for memcached despite their lagging Intel
on speed. Basically, you look elsewhere when a Xeon is too much.

Someday comes a point where apps that actually are compute-bound might want to
use more, slower cores for power/density/cost/etc.--I just don't think that
cutover is tomorrow for the kind of apps (most of) you or I work on.

Further out: This is a Marvell-designed core that looks slower than the
Cortex-A15-based Tegra K1 in a Chromebook (posted results elsewhere in the
comments; it could be a clock-speed issue, not anything inherent to the core
designs). Further out, there're some 64-bit ARM cores (Cortex-A57, X-Gene,
Project Denver though that may not wind up in servers) and at process bumps
(like TSMC 20nm). Related, check out [http://www.anandtech.com/show/8580/hp-
appliedmicro-and-ti-br...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8580/hp-appliedmicro-
and-ti-bring-new-arm-servers-to-retail) if you haven't. Of course, Intel isn't
sleeping, and low-power x86 chips will improve, too; there will be 14nm
versions of the Atom-based Xeons someday. As ever, fun times.

~~~
tonyplee
This Marvell SOC has 16 Serdes integrated inside the SOC can be partition to
Gige ethernet, SATA, or PCIe in any numbers of ways.

[http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-
xp/](http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-xp/)

Along with low power, make it very interesting.

I can see someone put 64, 128 of them in 1U chassis. This might be interesting
low cost system for someone who need simulcast live video streams to millions
of users at really low cost.

"64 4 cores CPU each with integrated 16 GIGE ports for fan out live video
stream that potentially fit inside 1U chassis"

~~~
nbkolchin
128 Armada cores in 1U is nearly impossible due to cooling issues.

~~~
tonyplee
May be not for Armada, but most of cell phone ARM cpu, the power is 1-2 watts
at max frequency.

If that hold true, 128 SOC in 1U can be 2-300 Watts. That can true ly go
against x86 for "some" applications.

~~~
nbkolchin
Actually 3-5 for current gen. And you don't count all other things that are
necessary for practical system: PCI-E connectors, RAM, Ethernet PHYs, etc.

P.S. I believe in 64 in 2U, though.

------
pmav
More data:

    
    
      ubuntu@c1-10-1-2-29:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test1 bs=1M count=512                                                               
      512+0 records in                                                                                                              
      512+0 records out                                                                                                             
      536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 5.43834 s, 98.7 MB/s
    
      ubuntu@c1-10-1-2-29:~$ dd if=test1 of=test2 bs=1M count=512                                                                   
      512+0 records in                                                                                                              
      512+0 records out                                                                                                             
      536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 5.869 s, 91.5 MB/s
    
      ubuntu@c1-10-1-2-29:~$ dd if=test2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=512                                                               
      512+0 records in                                                                                                              
      512+0 records out                                                                                                             
      536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 0.60429 s, 888 MB/s

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nbkolchin
Not impressive at all. Performance is not different from RK3188. Disk speed is
also not impressing. Not good example of ARM server.

I wonder what advantages this product have if any?

    
    
                              | Online Net   | RK3188
      Coremark (single)       | 3288.391976  | 4745.333755
      Coremark (dual cpu)     | 6579.488445  | 8505.209441
      Coremark (4-cpu)        | 12985.958932 | 13930.001741
      dhrystones              | 3204101.2    | 5810575.0
      linpack_dp              | 96396.624    | 280673.07
      linpack_sp              | 141666.344   | 286485.812
      nbench ASSIGNMENT       | 5.4852       | 11.569
      nbench BITFIELD         | 1.8627e+08   | 3.1242e+08
      nbench FOURIER          | 4346.6       | 9248.2
      nbench FP EMULATION     | 94.734       | 143.8
      nbench HUFFMAN          | 1035         | 1444.5
      nbench IDEA             | 2035.4       | 1963.3
      nbench LU DECOMPOSITION | 183.26       | 459.03
      nbench NEURAL NET       | 8.0897       | 13.392
      nbench NUMERIC SORT     | 573.47       | 733.99
      nbench STRING SORT      | 56.463       | 108.94
      scimark Composite Score | 113.53       | 230.20
      scimark FFT             | 121.34       | 199.90
      scimark LU              | 92.63        | 279.92
      scimark MonteCarlo      | 64.20        | 81.53
      scimark SOR             | 191.28       | 420.49
      scimark Sparse matmult  | 98.23        | 169.17
      stream Add              | 1239.3447    | 1615.2325
      stream Copy             | 1168.6045    | 1147.0347
      stream Scale            | 926.4318     | 1599.6019
      stream Triad            | 1066.3372    | 1528.7064
      stream_omp Add          | 3159.7990    | 1271.3516
      stream_omp Copy         | 2603.3387    | 1193.8474
      stream_omp Scale        | 2372.8052    | 1653.1527
      stream_omp Triad        | 2595.0168    | 1245.1069

------
rakoo
I wonder if the development of this idea will be hampered because of the ARM
architecture, or if on the contrary it will boost ARM compatibility from
developers. They claim they can have a better density of instances with
physical ARM chips than with virtualized x64 instances, and still use less
power. If this takes on it can be amazing.

------
adsche
> Follow @online_en on Twitter and send us a direct message with your email.

Don't they have to follow YOU to be able to do that?

~~~
13
Yes. They won't be getting anybody sending them a direct message.

~~~
iancarroll
Just tweet them and they'll follow you.

~~~
adsche
Thanks, used IRC, preferred that anyway, was just curious if I missed
something regarding twitter.

~~~
BillinghamJ
For a while you could configure your account to allow DMs from people you
don't follow. That was removed, but I suspect it may still exist for big
companies/verified accounts.

------
Termana
Something that has hopefully not been overlooked for the paid version - making
sure there is an ability to restart from the control panel (or whatever) -
after issuing the shutdown command as root I thought refreshing the page might
attempt to bring it back up but alas I was locked out for the rest of the 15
minutes.

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nlstitch
Argh.. 15 minutes wasn't enough to download openjdk7 and run some tests :-(.
Can anyone invite me?

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IgorPartola
This is really cool. The price is obviously going to be a question. The other
thing I wonder is if this is more or less reliable than a VPS, in case of
hardware failure.

------
oneofthose
Their next generation should include a SoC with a GPU. GPUs make these little
processors even more interesting.

------
fiatmoney
Isn't the whole point of "the cloud" to abstract away the specific hardware
you're using?

~~~
wmf
Nope, the cloud is about automation and self-service.

If the provider tells you what you're getting you can always ignore that
information if you don't care. But some customers care about hardware
specifics.

------
edouardb
You can access the service preview, ask an invitation on twitter @online_en or
on irc.online.net #onlinelabs

------
franze

        sudo rm / -rf --no-preserve-root
    

but it's not as fun as it sounds

------
letmethink12
Nice option, how much compute power does these ARM servers offer though?

~~~
monstermonster
Not a scientific measure by ANY measure, but a similar core I googled appears
to kick out about 200 bogomips whereas a virtual Xeon E5-2690 v2 core on one
of my machines knocks out 5984 bogomips.

I have 20 of those Xeon cores and 128Gb of RAM in a 2U.

Comparing the ratio of bogomips you'd have to get 598 of those ARM machines in
a 2U to get the same bogomips.

Like I said this isn't even slightly scientific but is at least interesting
trivia.

~~~
dwild
I found other source where they said it's around 1200 bogomips for a single
core. That would means that you only need 5 times more core which is far from
being an issue, 100 cores, which means only 25 processors.

~~~
monstermonster
Interesting!

However if you want one fast core, you're screwed :)

~~~
aimxhaisse
Yes, but considering that newer CPUs do not have increasing frequencies, I
guess you are more or less doomed to scale horizontally, and not vertically
anymore.

