New hardware in CloudLab: IBM POWER servers and Mellanox switches

[Robert Ricci]

We're happy to announce the immediate availability of servers based on
IBM's POWER processor and user-controllable (and -programmable)
switches from Mellanox.

The POWER machines are at Clemson, and sport two sockets with POWER8
CPUs, twenty cores, and total of 160 threads. One of the interesting
things about these machines is that they support the high
bandwidth/low latency NVLink fabric directly between the host CPU and
their GPUs (NVIDIA Telsa P100 SMX2). (On x86 machines, NVLink can
generally be used between GPUs, but not between the GPU and the host
CPU.) They have type 'ibm8335'; we have six of them, and you can read
more about them here:

http://docs.cloudlab.us/hardware.html#(part._cloudlab-clemson)

The Mellanox switches are at Utah. Like our other user-controlled
switches, they can be allocated to an individual experiment, giving
the user full administrative control over the the switch, and, through
the use of OSes like Open Network Linux, the user can write
substantial code that runs directly on the switch. These two
MSN2410-BB2Fs switches use Mellanox's own Spectrum ASIC, and offer a
different feature set and OS options than our other user-controllable
switches, which are from Dell and use Broadcom ASICs. You can read
more about our user-controled switches in our documentation:


http://docs.cloudlab.us/advanced-topics.html#(part._user-controlled-switches)