DOME Microserver: Performance Evaluation of suitable processors

......The DOME project [1] is a collaboration between IBM and ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, to develop a computing solution to the exascale requirements for data processing of the international “Square Kilometer Array” radio telescope. One sub-project is the development of low cost low energy consumption microservers for processing the huge amount of data generated every day. To achieve these goals we are developing a high density microserver enabled by a water cooling system [2] and a highly modular system to cover different classes of workloads [2] [3]. The system is built of node cards and baseboards. Node cards cover compute nodes, accelerator nodes, storage nodes, and switching nodes. Baseboards offer different interconnect fabrics for different classes of workloads at different cost levels. Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the microserver system.