Linaro launches 64bit ARM-based developer Cloud to go from server to node

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

IF the sign of a maturing technology is to move from a hetereogeneous development envinrnment to a homogeneous one, then the announcement today by Linaro is significant.

As a collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, Linaro's ARMv8 based Developer Cloud brings together silicon, server and software members to provide a cloud-based native ARM development environment to design, develop, port and test server, cloud and IoT applications without substantial upfront hardware investment.

The Developer Cloud is the combination of ARM based silicon vendors’ server hardware platforms, emerging cloud technologies, and many Linaro member driven projects, including server class boot architecture, kernel and virtualization. These projects have been under development since the formation of the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) and Linaro has already been enabling key developers via remote access to bare metal ARM servers for the last year.

Having high performance ARM servers able to service the ARM chips in IoT nodes in theory should provide a more optimised and efficient eco-system to improve performance, bring down costs and drive more innovation. 

“Linaro’s reference software platform already gives developers easy access to open source project contributions that advance highly efficient ARM technologies across a variety of markets,” said Jeff Underhill, Director of Server Programs at ARM. “The Linaro Developer Cloud builds on this with a rich new development environment supporting a range of applications but it’s particularly exciting to see the immediate value this will bring to the growing ARM-based server ecosystem.”

The Developer Cloud is based on OpenStack, using both Debian and CentOS as the underlying cloud OS infrastructure. It will use ARM based server platforms from Linaro members AMD, Cavium, Huawei and Qualcomm Technologies and will expand with demand, and as new server platforms come to market. These platforms will include both single socket and dual socket configurations as well as 10/40Gb networking, scalable storage and integrated accelerators that ARM SOC partners are bringing to market.

“Qualcomm Technologies is pleased to be supporting the Linaro Developer Cloud,” says Elsie Wahlig, principal engineer, Datacenter Group, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “As the software ecosystem for ARM servers gains momentum, the Developer Cloud presents a new vehicle for friction-less access to standards-based hardware and software to enable accelerated development by our software partners and open source community participants.”

Linaro has established two Developer Cloud facilities, one based in Cambridge, UK and the second based in Austin, Texas. Over time the Developer Cloud will expand through participating Linaro member and member partner data-centers providing cloud regions in China, North America and Europe.

“Linaro works with its members to provide reference open source software to accelerate the development of innovative applications taking advantage of ARM based platforms”, said George Grey, CEO of Linaro. “As the adoption of ARM based servers accelerates and IoT applications rapidly evolve, software developers need access to hardware and easy to use software reference platforms. The Linaro Developer Cloud is designed to broaden the availability of the latest hardware to developers globally, and to enable commercial and private cloud providers to utilize the implementation to accelerate deployment of their own offerings. Linaro will publish the end to end open source code for the implementation of the Developer Cloud”.

Access to the Developer Cloud will be provided via the linaro.cloud web portal. Through the portal, developers can request cloud access and may report bugs and performance issues. The portal will also provide a developer forum to share development and porting knowledge, as well as best practices for ARM servers.

“AMD has been working closely with Linaro and its members to make available a complete software stack for installations like the Linaro Developer Cloud for AMD’s ARM based server processors,” said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, Corporate Vice President, Enterprise Solutions Engineering at AMD. “The Opteron A1100 processor is built with these workloads in mind. We are providing the necessary support so the Opteron A1100 is readily available in the Linaro Developer Cloud and in a range of commercially available systems.”

“Data Center customers are continuing to drive demand for ARMv8 server solutions and the requirements for optimized software and applications are growing dramatically, said Larry Wikelius, Vice President Software Ecosystem and Solutions Group at Cavium. “Cavium has partnered with OVH to deliver a Public Cloud solution based on ThunderX Cavium’s ARMv8 Workload Optimized Processor. We expect this would accelerate development of optimized software on ARMv8 servers and enhance services offered by the Cloud providers and enterprises.”

Linaro has over 200 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online at http://www.linaro.org and http://www.96Boards.org.

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Sundance ships 12 core development system

Customer shipment three months after launch

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Sundance Multiprocessor Technology in Chesham, outside London, has started shipping its flagship multiprocessor development system to a customer three months after adding the system to its website. 
The EVP6472-941 (left) is directly targeted at the new breed of high intensity processing applications where performance and energy efficiency are critical.  Early adopter applications include digital recording, software defined radio (SDR), software reconfigurable applications in signals intelligence (SIGINT) and military communications (MILCOM) platforms.
The US$5,995 system uses two Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320C6472 multicore DSPs with twelve TMS320C64x+™ processor cores clocked at 500MHz for real time processing tasks.  A Xilinx Virtex-5 FX30T FPGA provides the co-processor, with an embedded PowerPC440 processor core and a quad channel 14-bit ADC sampling at up to 250 MSPS.  The EVP6472-941 offers two DDR2 SDRAM memory banks of 256MB assessable by each C6472 processor.
The EVP6472-941 is supplied with a complete board support package including the USB drivers, software functions and API for Windows.  Essential tools are TI’s Code Composer Studio 4.x that is supplied free of charge with the XDS100 USB JTAG Emulator for the C6472 DSP processor.  Xilinx ISE development software can be downloaded from xilinx.com to target the Virtex-5 FX30T FPGA.
A range of third party design tools for TI DSP and Xilinx’s FPGA also support the EVP6472-941; including 3L’s Diamond Multiprocessor Tool-Suite, RTW-EC and HDLCoder from The MathWorks™, comprehensive VHDL and Verilog support from EDA vendors, and Co-Developer and a growing range of IP-Cores from Impulse.
Extensive general purpose input/output (GPIO) connectors are available with the EVP6472-941.  Sundance Local Bus (SLB) interface to customize input/output (I/O) signals, four RS-232 ports, Gigabit Ethernet connection, LVTTL lines for synchronization, MicroSD Flash socket as an extension of the on-board Flash memories and JTAG headers to enable DSP and FPGA debugging.

"As we continue to see an uptick in business confidence and design starts, the launch of the EVP6472-941 signals a new generation of high intensity platform solutions architected around the C6472,"” said Flemming Christensen, Managing Director of Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd.  “"Development of the EVP6472-941 reflects the strength of our collaboration with TI.  As we roll out the new family of Multicore Developer Platforms (MDPs), customers will have even greater flexibility to configure a platform solution that fits their power, performance and cost budgets.”"

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Step forward for multicore Linux

CriticalBlue and MontaVista Partner to Expand Multicore Software Development

CriticalBlue, the Edinburgh-based pioneer of embedded multicore software analysis, exploration and verification tools, has joined the MontaVista partner program and will make their Prism product available on MontaVista Linux 6 and Montavista Linux Carrier Grade Edition products.
This announcement continues the broadening of Prism integrations with key players in the multicore software development eco-system by adding support for an industrial strength, commercial quality Linux. Prism is an award-winning embedded multicore programming system which allows software engineers to easily asses and realize the full potential of multicore processors without significant change to their development flow. It analyzes the behavior of code running on either hardware development boards or simulators. It allows engineers to take their existing sequential code, and without making any changes, explore and analyze opportunities for concurrency. Having identified the optimal parallelization strategy in this way, the developer will implement parallel structures, and use Prism again to verify efficient and thread-safe operations.
MontaVista Linux is the first commercial Linux provider to be supported by Prism. The Prism Eclipse plug-in will be integrated into the MontaVista DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE), providing the most advanced embedded Linux development environment for multicore software on the market. MontaVista customers will now be able to quickly analyze the potential benefit of new, high-performance, multicore software platforms for their existing application code and develop new code and quickly tune it for operation on multicore processors, all within a single MontaVista DevRocket environment, and all in the familiar Eclipse framework.
Prism is available today for ARM and MIPS cores with several other leading multicore processor architectures coming in Q1 2010.

“Developers need to analyze their real world applications running on commercial Linux platforms like MontaVista Linux using common frameworks like Eclipse,” said David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. “By partnering with MontaVista, and integrating with the MontaVista DevRocket IDE, Prism will support the broadest range of platforms on a commercial quality Linux, allowing our joint customers a way to rapidly ensure safe and timely migration of their software onto multicore platforms and efficient exploitation of the parallelism inherent within.”

“By combining CriticalBlue’s Prism solution, MontaVista Linux and MontaVista DevRocket, our customers will benefit from the most advanced multicore integrated development environment available for embedded Linux,” said Dan Cauchy, vice president, marketing at MontaVista Software. “This integrated environment will allow developers to quickly analyze, convert and tune sequential code into parallel code and harness the full capabilities of MontaVista Linux running on modern multicore processors.”