Maxeler Technologies has launched the MPC-X series for deployment of dataflow computing to complement standard servers. The MPC-X1000 provides eight dataflow engines with the equivalent performance of 40 to 60 multicore x86 servers and power consumption comparable to a single high-end server. A 1U rack-mount system that supports dual redundant power supplies and IPMI-compatible remote management, a single MPC-X1000 has 384GB of memory and over 16TB of memory in a single rack.
Resources within the MPC-X1000, including dynamic allocation of dataflow engines to CPU threads and processes, and balancing demands on the cluster at runtime to maximise overall performance, are managed by Maxeler’s software. With a Linux RPM installation, any CPU server in the cluster can be quickly upgraded to benefit from dataflow computing.
The MPC-X series dataflow appliances provide multiple dataflow engines as shared resources on the network, allowing them to be used by applications running anywhere in a cluster. The MPC-X series combines dual FDR/QDR Infiniband connectivity with unique RDMA technology that provides direct memory to dataflow engine transfers without inefficient memory copies. In one key benchmark, the MPC-X1000's hardware-enabled RDMA delivered 40 per cent speedup over a software-only framework for remote execution over a network.
