University of Michigan Partners With Cavium

Cavium, Inc., a provider of semiconductor products that enable secure processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking, and the University of Michigan (U-M) announced a partnership that will position U-M in data-intensive scientific research by creating a big data computing cluster using dual socket servers powered by Cavium’s ThunderX ARMv8-A workload optimized processors.

The ThunderX product family is Cavium’s 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor for next generation data center and cloud applications, and features custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, high memory bandwidth and large memory capacity.

The product family also includes integrated hardware accelerators, integrated feature rich high bandwidth network and storage IO, virtualized core and IO, and scalable high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet fabric, which affords ThunderX performance per dollar and watt. They are compliant with ARMv8-A architecture specifications as well as ARM’s SBSA and SBBR standards, and supported by industry OS, hypervisor and software tool and application vendors.

The $3.5 million ThunderX computing cluster will enable U-M researchers to, for example, process massive amounts of data generated by remote sensors in distributed manufacturing environments, or by test fleets of automated and connected vehicles.

U-M and Cavium chose to run the cluster on Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) which is based on open source Apache Hadoop. The ThunderX cluster will deliver compute services for the Hadoop analytics and ultimately a total of 3PB of storage space.

“U-M scientists are conducting groundbreaking research in big data already, in areas like connected and automated transportation, learning analytics, precision medicine and social science,” said Eric Michielssen, associate VP for Advanced Research Computing (ARC). “This partnership with Cavium will accelerate the pace of data-driven research and opening up new avenues of inquiry.“

“I know from experience that U-M researchers are capable of amazing discoveries,” said Syed Ali, MSEE ’81, founder and CEO, Cavium.  “Cavium is honored to help break new ground in big data research at one of the top universities in the world.“

“Hortonworks is excited to be a part of forward leading research at University of Michigan exploring low-powered, HPC,” said Nadeem Asghar, VP and global head technical alliances, Hortonworks. “We see this as a great opportunity to further expand the platform and segment enablement for Hortonworks and the ARM community.“

Alec Gallimore, dean, U-M College of Engineering, said the Cavium partnership is a milestone in the development of the college and the university. 

“It is clear that the ability to rapidly gain insights into vast amounts of data is key to the next wave of engineering and science breakthroughs,” he said. “Without a doubt, the Cavium platform will allow our faculty and researchers to harness the power of big data, both in the classroom and in their research.”