Abstract

Emerging ARM-based microserver architectures offer increased power efficiency and core density, but have several resource limitations compared to traditional server architectures, mainly in the compute power and the amount of addressable RAM per core. Their energy efficiency, the increasing parity in performance with power-efficient x86 platforms and the widespread support for the ARM ecosystem makes them suitable candidates for replacing x86 equipment. In parallel to this shift towards massive low-power core density we are also seeing a trend in emerging smart FPGA programmable hardware that controls centralised IO resources such as network and storage peripherals shared across multiple non-cache coherent processors.

At the OnApp Emerging technologies division, my team has been been designing and developing a novel hypervisor software stack to address these new hardware architectures. Starting with the highly successful EU funded EUROSERVER project, and continuing with the current ACTICLOUD project, we have developed a low power clustered hypervisor with centralised runtime programmable hardware IO control across the cluster. Today we are working alongside hardware development partners such as Kaleao Ltd. and are helping to shape the next generation of server architecture in bringing a joint hardware and software product to market. The KMAX MicroVisor provides extremely high core density and IO acceleration offload support for storage and network accesses resulting in considerable improvements in power efficiency and IO performance with a complete end-to-end orchestration and management stack for all types of workloads.

Biography

Dr. Julian Chesterfield is the Chief Scientific Officer at OnApp, responsible for Emerging Technologies Research and Development specialising in server virtualisation, storage and network IO. OnApp is the leading provider of cloud orchestration software with over a third of all public clouds running on their software. Julian completed a PhD in Computer Science at Cambridge University after which he was an early member of the Cambridge based tech startup XenSource, subsequently acquired by Citrix, where he was the storage architect for the XenServer and open source Xen products.