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News from EETimes points towards a startup that claims to offer an extreme performance advantage over Infiniband.&nbsp; A3Cube Inc. has developed a variation of the PCIe Express on a Network Interface Card to offer lower latency.&nbsp; The company is promoting their Ronniee Express technology via a PCIe 2.0 driven FPGA to offer sub-microsecond latency across a 128 server cluster.</p>
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In the Sockperf benchmark, numbers from A3Cube put performance at around 7x that of Infiniband and PCIe 3.0 x8, and thus claim that the approach beats the top alternatives.&nbsp; The PCIe support of the device at the physical layer enables quality-of-service features, and A3Cube claim the fabric enables a cluster of 10000 nodes to be represented in a single image without congestion.</p>
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The aim for A3Cube will be primarily in HFT, genomics, oil/gas exploration and real-time data analytics.&nbsp; Prototypes for merchants are currently being worked on, and it is expected that two versions of network cards and a 1U switch based on the technology will be available before July.</p>
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The new IP from A3Cube is kept hidden away, but the logic points towards device enumeration and the extension of the PCIe root complex of a cluster of systems.&nbsp; This is based on the quote regarding PCIe 3.0 incompatibility based on the different device enumeration in that specification.&nbsp; The plan is to build a solid platform on PCIe 4.0, which puts the technology several years away in terms of non-specialized deployment.</p>
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As many startups, the process for A3Cube is to now secure venture funding.&nbsp; The approach to Ronniee Express is different to that of PLX who are developing a direct PCIe interconnect for computer racks.</p>
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A3Cube&rsquo;s webpage on the technology states the fabric uses a combination of hardware and software, while remaining application transparent.&nbsp; The product combines multiple 20 or 40 Gbit/s channels, with the aim at petabyte-scale Big Data and HPC storage systems.</p>
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Information from Willem Ter Harmsel puts the Ronniee NIC system as a global shared memory container, with an in-memory network between nodes.&nbsp; CPU/Memory/IO are directly connected, with 800-900 nanosecond latencies, and the &lsquo;memory windows&rsquo; facilitates low latency traffic.</p>
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Using A3cube&rsquo;s storage OS, byOS, and 40 terabytes of SSDs and the Ronniee Express fabric, five storage nodes were connected together via 4 links per NIC allowing for 810ns latency in any direction.&nbsp; A3Cube claim 4 million IOPs with this setup.</p>
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Further, in interview by Willem and Anontella Rubicco shows that &ldquo;Ronniee is designed to build massively parallel storage and analytics machines; not to be used as an &ldquo;interconnection&rdquo; as Infiniband or Ethernet.&nbsp; It is designed to accelerate applications and create parallel storage and analytics architecture.&rdquo;</p>
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Source: EETimes, A3Cube, willemterharmsel.nl.</p>
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Source: AnandTech
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