Colloquium: ‘Enzian: a research computer’

Dates & Times

Thursday April 19, 2018
3:45 PM – 5:00 PM
(Refreshments & networking until 4 PM)

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04/19/2018 3:45 PM
04/19/2018 5:00 PM
America/New_York

Colloquium: Enzian: a research computer
Academic research in rack-scale and datacenter computing today is hamstrung by lack of hardware. Cloud providers and hardware vendors build custom accelerators, interconnects, and networks for commercially important workloads, but university researchers are stuck with commodity, off-the-shelf parts. Enzian is a research computer being developed at ETH Zurich (in collaboration with Cavium and Xilinx) which addresses this problem. An Enzian board consists of a server-class ARMv8 SoC tightly coupled and coherent with a large FPGA (eliminating PCIe), with about 0.5 TB DDR4 and nearly 500 Gb/s of network I/O either to the CPU (over Ethernet) or directly to the FPGA (potentially over custom protocols). Enzian runs both Barrelfish and Linux operating systems. Many Enziam boards can be connected in a rack-scale machine (either with or without a discrete switch) and the design is intended to allow many different research use-cases: zero-overhead run-time verification of software invariants, novel interconnect protocols for remote memory access, hardware enforcement of access control in a large machine, high-performance streaming analytics using a combination of software and configurable hardware, and much more. By providing a powerful and flexible platform for computer systems research, Enzian aims to enable more relevant and far-reaching work on future compute platforms.

Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180, Boston MA

Location

Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

Directions

Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium

Timothy Roscoe

Professor, Systems Group of the Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich

Enzian: a research computer

Abstract

Academic research in rack-scale and datacenter computing today is hamstrung by lack of hardware. Cloud providers and hardware vendors build custom accelerators, interconnects, and networks for commercially important workloads, but university researchers are stuck with commodity, off-the-shelf parts.

Enzian is a research computer being developed at ETH Zurich (in collaboration with Cavium and Xilinx) which addresses this problem. An Enzian board consists of a server-class ARMv8 SoC tightly coupled and coherent with a large FPGA (eliminating PCIe), with about 0.5 TB DDR4 and nearly 500 Gb/s of network I/O either to the CPU (over Ethernet) or directly to the FPGA (potentially over custom protocols). Enzian runs both Barrelfish and Linux operating systems. Many Enziam boards can be connected in a rack-scale machine (either with or without a discrete switch) and the design is intended to allow many different research use-cases: zero-overhead run-time verification of software invariants, novel interconnect protocols for remote memory access, hardware enforcement of access control in a large machine, high-performance streaming analytics using a combination of software and configurable hardware, and much more.

By providing a powerful and flexible platform for computer systems research, Enzian aims to enable more relevant and far-reaching work on future compute platforms.

Bio

Timothy Roscoe is a Full Professor in the Systems Group of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich, where he works on operating systems, networks, and distributed systems, including the Barrelfish research OS and the Strymon high-performance stream processor for datacenter monitoring. He received a PhD in 1995 from the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, where he was a principal designer and builder of the Nemesis OS. After three years working on web-based collaboration systems at a startup in North Carolina, Mothy joined Sprint’s Advanced Technology Lab in Burlingame, California in 1998, working on cloud computing and network monitoring. He joined Intel Research at Berkeley in April 2002 as a principal architect of PlanetLab, an open, shared platform for developing and deploying planetary-scale services. In September 2006 he spent four months as a visiting researcher in the Embedded and Real-Time Operating Systems group at National ICT Australia in Sydney, before joining ETH Zurich in January 2007. His current research interests include monitoring, modelling, and managing complex enterprise datacenters, and system software for modern hardware. He was named Fellow of the ACM in 2013 for contributions to operating systems and networking research.

Agenda

3:45 PM: Refreshments & Networking
4:00 – 5:00 PM: Talk and Discussion

Questions?

Contact the Collaboratory with any questions you may have about this event.

Recording of Event

This talk was held as scheduled. A recording can be accessed here.