Eideticom, IBM, Rackspace and Xilinx Demo PCIe Gen4 NVMe System

Eidetic Communications Inc., IBM Corporation, Rackspace US, Inc. and Xilinx, Inc. demonstrate the Eideticom NoLoad NVMe Computational Storage acceleration platform running the NVMe protocol at PCIe Gen4 speeds in a Rackspace BarrelEye G2 POWER9-equipped system, doubling performance compared to other systems in production today.

This announcement enables Rackspace, IBM and other Open Compute and OpenPOWER system vendors to avail of the next generation of storage and compute acceleration performance leveraging the PCIe Gen4 capabilities of IBM’s POWER9 processor, Rackspace’s server, Xilinx’s FPGA technology and Eideticom’s NVMe-based accelerator products.

NVMe is the most popular protocol for SSDs in enterprise, data-center and high-performance computing markets. It has a broad ecosystem and software support in all major OSs including Linux. NVMe uses PCIe to connect the CPU to the SSDs and POWER9 is the first production CPU with PCIe Gen4 IO, nearly doubling the data bandwidth of PCIe Gen3, to which x86 remains committed. Eideticom deployed their NVMe-based accelerator, NoLoad product on top of Xilinx’s FPGA technology on a production ready FPGA acceleration card inside a production ready OpenPOWER server from Rackspace.

Some photos of  Eideticom NVMe NoLoad card inside Rackspace BarrelEye G2 server.
In top-left you can see external power supply unit.
In bottom-left you can see two POWER9 CPUs hidden under to orange heat-sinks.
In bottom-right you get a view of  NoLoad plugged into one
of  PCIe slots on Zaius motherboard.

“We built the POWER9 CPU from the ground-up with the most data-intensive workloads in mind,” said Brad McCredie, VP and fellow, IBM. “PCIe Gen4 devices are critical components to driving performance across the system stack, and with POWER9 their potential can be realized.“

“We are excited to incorporate Eideticom’s storage acceleration and PCIe Gen4 technology in our Barreleye G2 server,” said Adi Gangidi, system design engineer, Rackspace. “Accelerator IP enablers like Eideticom are helping drive the widespread data center adoption of a new and unmatched class of IO.“

“Xilinx UltraScale+ All Programmable devices offer unique capabilities to enable the highest performance for demanding Data Center storage and compute acceleration workloads,” said Manish Muthal, VP, data Center, Xilinx. “Leveraging leading standards based interfaces including NVM Express and PCIe Gen4 allows application developers to rapidly deploy new solutions into the market.“

“The POWER9 processor from IBM is the perfect CPU for data-intensive workloads like machine learning and now we can feed that processor with data velocity that other systems simply can’t match,” said Stephen Bates, CTO, Eideticom. “Customers need this to improve the performance of their applications and can utilize this benefit to reduce PCIe lane count and free up slots for other IO devices. No other CPU in production today can offer this kind of performance improvement. Combining this CPU with the next-generation OpenCompute/OpenPOWER server from RackSpace leads to a solution with storage bandwidth that is second to none.“

“The OpenPOWER Foundation has been aggressively adopting PCIe Gen4 because we see the need for faster storage, network and compute,” said Bryan Talik, president, OpenPOWER Foundation. “OpenPOWER has already demonstrated PCIe Gen4 support with IBM, Mellanox, and Xilinx and we are delighted that Eideticom can now offer fast storage and compute via NVMe over that PCIe Gen4 ecosystem.“

Blog: NVM Express over PCIe Gen4 Baby!