Original: Tan Jing
Cloud vendors' desire for new computing architectures is hysterical.
A few streets away, you can hear the nagging voice: "Oh, CPU, put it down, you dare to move this, you can't waste resources on the network and storage load." ”
One of the fundamental technical tasks of cloud computing is to turn the traditional, CPU-centric computing architecture into a saleable public computing resource through a "software-defined" approach.
Nowadays, to do a good job in cloud computing, it is not enough to understand software, but to understand more things: computer architecture.
This kicked off the prelude to cloud vendors breaking through the infrastructure battlefield, and Alibaba Cloud won this battle, and was more qualified to serve more than 4 million customers around the world and make good use of millions of servers around the world.
Millions of servers, so many, how to manage?
"Fei Tian" to manage.
Feitian is Alibaba Cloud's self-developed cloud computing operating system and a distributed operating system.
Through virtualization, pooling, scheduling technology, all physical resources through the way of computing power, just like a server to work.
Put so many physical resources into the hands of customers in the form of cloud computing.
Computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "People who really care about software should make their own hardware."
In order to make the software of cloud computing more powerful, we pull up special hardware to help.
The original hardware "unified" to help, and now the hardware "deliberately" to help, so it is proprietary hardware.
Therefore, smart network cards and DPUs are hotly discussed.
The software of each cloud vendor is different, more precisely, the system software stack of each cloud computing vendor is very different, and it is necessary to design hardware specifically for the requirements and customize hardware acceleration.
All losses are waste.
The performance of multiple systems has some hardware performance loss compared to the performance provided by traditional hardware. Looking at the scale of Alibaba Cloud today, it wastes 0.1%, which is a lot of money.
In order to get a better product, general-purpose hardware alone will not work.
Under the technological evolution path of deep collaboration between software and hardware, cloud manufacturers have an exclusive secret (Know-How).
In the big way, the era of cloud computing calls for a new type of computer architecture.
This innovation is from the computer in the internal architecture of IDC to do innovation, from the previous CPU-centered architecture, to the "cloud operating system + CIPU" as the center of the architecture.
Feitian Cloud operating system runs on top of the CIPU to manage and dispatch the underlying physical resources. The Feitian kernel includes Shenlong Computing, Pangu Storage, Roselle Network and Security, all of which are deeply adapted to the capabilities of CIPU itself.
CIPU is a cloud processor, which is equivalent to connecting the Feitian operating system to the server.
On the software, CIPU supports Feitian Cloud operating system, which efficiently completes the orchestration and scheduling of virtualized resources.
On the hardware, the Feitian operating system can quickly manage the physical equipment of the data center through the CIPU and accelerate the network and storage hardware.
This not only eliminates the CPU's computing power, but also enhances the performance of the network and storage.
CIPU is a new type of computer architecture in the era of cloud computing.
If you want to understand today, you must read yesterday.
The first step is to understand the task unloading.
The CPU assumes two roles:
The first is calculation.
The second is control, which has a lot of control logic, which coordinates various components on the entire server, including the network and hard disks.
This logic is very correct for a single server.
The scale of the cloud computing management server is very large, that is, it wants to control the storage resources of millions of nodes, the resources of the network, it wants to control, this time the control ability of a single CPU can not be done.
At this scale, the Feitian cloud operating system needs to redefine the logic of control and calculation.
The CPU is overwhelmed by the ability to handle a large number of upper-level applications, maintain the infrastructure of the underlying software, and deal with various special tasks (IO protocols).
Therefore, the "burden" is offloaded from the CPU, including the network process, virtualization functions offloaded to dedicated hardware, the server of the data center, will gradually add a variety of acceleration cards, the cloud computing field will emerge a number of representative products.
Computing power resources are like "practical area of houses", whether there is waste or not, all depends on technical strength.
The second step is to understand the computing architecture.
The goal of "Feitian + CIPU" is to turn millions of servers into a supercomputer.
A large number of computations require data interaction across network storage and networks, and in this process, CIPU accelerates. CIPU is the concept of a big data center, a controller for big cloud computing, and it is a computing power acceleration.
Alibaba Cloud believes that it should break the traditional CPU-centric cloud computing architecture and define a new generation of cloud computing basic technologies.
Alibaba Cloud, a CIPU processor, is not a substitute relationship with the CPU, CIPU is a different form of computing architecture.
"Inspiration" comes from Alibaba Cloud Dragon Card, which is Alibaba Cloud's self-developed product, and the outside world cannot produce Dragon Card, and Alibaba Cloud does not sell it to the outside world.
It can be said that the Shenlong card is an implementation of CIPU. In other words, CIPU is the industrialization standard of the Shenlong card.
The infrastructure of cloud computing is the epitome of multi-genre technologies.
There's software, there's hardware, there's computing, there's networking, there's storage, there's virtualization, there's security, there's accelerators, there's drivers, there's frameworks, there's applications, it's all intertwined.
The high maturity of cloud computing business forces the maturity of infrastructure to rise, which is also the motivation for Alibaba Cloud to define a new type of computer architecture.
(End)
Finally, let's introduce the editor-in-chief himself,
I am Tan Jing, a science and technology industry science writer.
In order to discover stories in the times,
I chased after the god of science and technology and blocked the technology company.
Occasionally write novels and draw comics.
Life is short and there are no shortcuts.
I would also like to read my article and focus on "Dear Data".
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