JULY 2018

5 ‘Killer Apps’
Helping ARM
Processors Disrupt
The Data Center
They’ve taken command of mobile and embedded
device architectures. Now, their power/performance
profiles have elevated ARM processors to a level
playing field against Intel Xeon – at least for some
classes of workloads
By Scott M. Fulton, III

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Image Source: Qualcomm
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5 ‘KILLER APPS’ HELPING ARM PROCESSORS DISRUPT THE DATA CENTER
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T
Follow Follow here’s a perception in the server community that, when the perpetual motion machine that was Moore’s Law collided head-on with
the laws of physics, the evolution of x86 processors derailed along with it. The “tick-tock” cadence that previously set the pace of
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Intel’s production has been suspended, replaced for the time being by a different, perhaps syncopated, not-yet-fascinating rhythm.

Suddenly there’s a genuine opening for competitive hardware architectures in the data center. The timing may be too late for AMD,
which already had to drastically scale down to survive. But for the producers of ARMv8-A series processors — such as Cavium, Ampere,
and Qualcomm (now that it’s staying in the data center chip business) — it’s a chance to prove that low-power RISC architecture is
indeed suited for servers as well as thin clients and embedded devices.

The ARM wave, if there is to be one, won’t wash over everything and everyone all at once.

“The kind of interest that we’re seeing beyond HPC (High Performance Computing) is from the hyperscalers, the very big cloud players,”
Jon Masters, chief ARM architect at Red Hat, said. “And I think they’re going to be the driving force in terms of shaping the future ARM
server SoCs that go into design.”

High-performance customers mainly consist of academic institutions and research laboratories, whose applications are crafted in
high-level languages, and for whom migration to ARM is as simple as recompiling existing code.

These are the earliest adopters of ARM in the data center. Where we should expect to see traction, if ARM is to penetrate more deeply,
is in certain classes of applications attempting to exploit any power/performance advantages they can find. They could open up new
opportunities for additional classes of applications to move onto ARM-based infrastructure down the road.

We’ve been asking around to see which classes of application are making headway in this post-early adopter phase of the new
ARM server ecosystem. Here now are five specific server applications where developers are looking to exploit performance and cost
advantages ARM may have over x86 in the data center.

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1. Electronic Design
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Automation (Cadence)
Cadence Design Systems is the runaway market
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share leader in the field of electronic design
automation software (EDA). One aspect of this
field involves simulation: reproducing the logic
of a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design, and running
that logic through a battery of performance tests
prior to verification for production. Cadence
says that the job of simulation can comprise as
much as 70 percent of the entire EDA
compute workload.
Last year, Cadence began a collaboration
with both Qualcomm and Cavium in
an experiment to port the parallel logic
simulation part of its EDA workload,
which Cadence calls Xcelium, to clusters
of ARM-based servers. The goal here
is to give high-end design shops a
less expensive means to perform high-
intensity, parallel processing workloads,
leveraging the lower cost-per-core of
Qualcomm’s 10 nm, 48-core Centriq
2400 processors, and Cavium’s 16
nm, 64-core (dual socket) ThunderX2
processors — neither of which require
liquid cooling, even at high densities. Cadence Xcelium Parallel Logic Simulation Source: Cadence Design Systems
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5 ‘KILLER APPS’ HELPING ARM PROCESSORS DISRUPT THE DATA CENTER
Larry Wikelius, Cavium’s VP for software ecosystem
and solutions, said his team participated with
Cadence’s CDNLive conference in April 2017 in
demonstrating Xcelium on ARM to attendees.
“One of the things they highlighted in terms of
performance is scaling over the number of cores
that we have in ThunderX2, both for efficiency as well
as predictability,” he said. “As an ISV (independent
software vendor) looking to position its product with
end users, that predictability is a big win for them.”
2. Network Functions
Virtualization (OPNFV)
One of the principal components of
telecommunications providers’ shift to 5G wireless
architecture involves the distribution of network
functions within and among their data centers.
Network Functions Virtualization, or NFV, will help
them replace costly and power-hungry custom
hardware at Radio Access Network (RAN) base
stations with software running in centralized data
centers, often former telco central
offices. Moving processing away
from the base stations is expected
to make networks more scalable and
easier to manage and automate, as
well as slash the cost of cooling the
stations (their principal operating cost
generator) by as much as 50 percent.
Since 2016, Cavium has been
partnering with the Open Networking
Foundation and Open Network
Laboratory (ON.Lab) in an effort
to help telcos deploy C-RAN, the
virtualized form of RAN, on ThunderX
and ThunderX2-based servers.
These servers would be stationed in
what telcos are calling edge cloud
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centers — data centers that are more centralized
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than base stations, yet connected to each other
by fiber optic cable, thus minimizing latency.
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This effort drew the attention of Linaro, the
consortium of ARM software developers, which
since then has been working to bring
OPNFV, the leading open source
NFV platform enabler, onto its Linaro
Stable Kernel (LSK) Linux platform.
Red Hat’s Masters is among those
spearheading this effort.
Edge compute is a “fabulous
opportunity” for ARM, he said. In
making the transition, telcos are
making the same kinds of arguments
hyperscale cloud platforms have
made about ensuring supply reliability.
“They have one or two vendors they
work with, and that’s great, but they
like to have one or two other options,
because they’re now buying so many
processors that they want to make
sure some disruption can’t prevent
them from being successful.”
Certain building blocks of the edge
cloud have a lot in common with
hyperscale cloud data centers, Guru Source: ENEA
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5 ‘KILLER APPS’ HELPING ARM PROCESSORS DISRUPT THE DATA CENTER
Parulkar, executive director of the Open Network
Foundation, said. “The same servers that are used
in data centers can be used in edge cloud as well.
Similarly, even in the edge cloud, you need some
kind of a packet-switching fabric. There, all the
good work that [Open Compute Project] is doing,
can be leveraged in the edge cloud.”
Cavium’s Wikelius told us his company has
produced reference systems used by ON.Lab
to certify new releases of OPNFV against its
ThunderX and more entry-level Octeon TX series. It
is servers based on those reference
architectures that are at the center
of working 5G demonstrations
during the past four Mobile World
Congress gatherings, including last
February.
Sweden-based NFV provider ENEA
has begun hosting a compliance
testing laboratory for developers
building virtual network functions
(VNF) for telcos and video service
providers. Called Pharos Lab
and co-funded with the Linux
Foundation, it uses 64-bit ARMv8-
based servers to simulate a fully
functional edge cloud platform.
Here, open source developers can
deploy virtual network functions
to ensure their compliance with
OPNFV requirements prior to their
deployment in the real world. One of
the most compelling applications to
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boxes — the full functionality of a cable tuner box,
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entirely as software.
3. Content Delivery (NGINX)
The application that gave rise to the edge as a
place for substantial computation to begin with is
the Content Delivery Network: bringing multimedia
content as close to the end user as possible, thus
minimizing latency during data transit. NGINX is a
Data rate and power consumption by transient vs. persistent connections
software component that began its existence as a
more sophisticated Web server than Apache but
has since evolved into a programmable network
gateway component for distributed services,
including for edge computing.
In May 2017, technology analyst firm Tirias
Research, led by In-Stat veteran Jim McGregor,
conducted a study into the total costs of
ownership for two server clusters — one based
on Cavium ThunderX CN8890-AAP, the other on
Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 processors. Both clusters
ran NGINX as content gateways, with varying
numbers of persistent (video-style) and transient
(Web-style) connections.
The Tirias team’s data showed the ThunderX
cluster performed slightly better with persistent
connections, while the Xeon cluster performed
better with transient. The differences between their
profiles was not enough to generate headlines. Yet
the ThunderX processors cost about 42 percent
of the Xeons’ price up-front and due to their
lower power consumption were able to shave
26 percent from a company’s theoretical three-
year operating expenditures.
Like many open source projects, NGINX has
a freely distributed and a commercial edition
(NGINX Plus). Cavium has collaborated directly
with the software maker on the latter, Wikelius
said. The reason has to do with micro-tuning for
the ThunderX architecture, which is the kind of
customization that the open source community
may lack the tools to accomplish.

Last March, CDN provider Cloudflare announced

that all data centers added in its ongoing global
expansion will be deploying Qualcomm Centriq-
Source: Tirias Research based servers.

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4. Video Object Recognition (TensorRT)
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Up until recently, ARM Ltd.’s value proposition
for ARM processors in machine learning (ML)
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scenarios has focused on what it characterizes as
the edge: the geographic areas closest to where
data is ingested. Its argument has been, if devices
at the edge were smarter about how data is being
used — for instance, with object detection — they
could be delivering results back to servers instead
of raw data.

Here’s the problem: Not all pattern recognition

jobs are local. It’s one thing to recognize a truck
on a highway, yet another thing entirely to visualize
a fleet.

Last February, ARM launched a trial balloon called

Project Trillium, centering around support for neural
network frameworks such as TensorFlow and
Caffe throughout all ARM architecture processors.
Admittedly, ARM the company is a bit biased
toward its client-side processors, Cortex-A55
and Cortex-A75, and it still argues that machine
learning tasks are “moving to the edge.”
Yet the keyword for the Trillium launch is
“scalability.” Edge devices won’t exactly be the
best form factors for GPU accelerators. The
crack in the door for server-side neural nets is
Source: ARM Limited
represented in the ARM chart above. As the
requirement for operations per second increases,
ARM’s plan would move ML jobs back into the
data center.
There, the company’s partnership with Nvidia,
announced last March, will come into play. Nvidia’s
TensorRT platform is a kind of inference engine
for neural networks that have already been trained
through frameworks such as TensorFlow. Think
of TensorRT as a higher-level reasoning system,
observing the patterns obtained from devices in
the field and inferring whether deeper patterns
and equivalencies exist between them. Imagine if
you were given multiple maps of different portions

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of planets, and your job was to determine which rendered remotely and delivered over the network out there are ARM-based,” he said. If Hatch runs
Follow Follow maps belonged to the same planets — that’s the to the edge. Its case for doing this, which he Android in the cloud, it makes a lot of sense to run
type of job in which TensorRT would excel. finds compelling, consists of things like ensuring it on ARM processors. “I think you’ll see similar
Follow the games work on low-end Android phones in cases where people will look to run existing
developing countries and being able to test an workloads that already run on ARM.”
5. Graphics Pre-rendering (Hatch) app quickly before buying it.
Historically, the gaming industry has been built
around an ecosystem of devices and consoles, “The overwhelming majority of Android devices
where all the 3D graphics rendering and shading
takes place about two feet away from the joystick.
But as more and more gamers adopt smartphones,
tablets, and other devices where discrete GPUs
would run too hot, gaming service providers are
discovering the benefits of rendering scenes on
the server side.

In November 2016, Rovio Entertainment, the

maker of Angry Birds, spun off a division called
Hatch Entertainment, whose mission was to
provide premium games — both the software and
the hardware that hosts them — on a subscription
basis. The hardware would not be consoles or
devices, but virtual servers hosted by bare-metal
cloud service provider and ARM partner Packet.
Those servers are equipped with Qualcomm
Centriq 2400 processors.

Hatch, explained Red Hat’s Masters, runs Android

games on the server side. The graphics are Source: Hatch Entertainment

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About
the Author
SCOTT M. FULTON, III For nearly 35 years, Scott M. Fulton, III has chronicled the history of computing
as it happened, from the unveiling of the Apple III to the undoing of MS-DOS to the rise of the cloud.
Scott was one of the original online managers of the Delphi network (you remember modems, don’t
you?), part of the original editorial team of Computer Shopper (you remember paper, don’t you?), and was
managing editor of Betanews for four years (and if you remember that, please get in touch). In addition
to Data Center Knowledge, Scott appears in the software development publication The New Stack, and
is the purveyor of ZDNet Scale — a safari-style journey into the deep woods of technology. If you have a
story about how a data center methodology or practice has changed the way you work, tell Scott about
it, and there’s a good chance he’ll compare it to the Lewis & Clark expedition, the Norman Conquest, or
the migration of Antarctic penguins.

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