Comments on: XtremeData announces its DBx data warehouse appliance

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:04:20 +0000

Huh?

TPC-H is a joke, and Oracle is one of the chief perpetrators of same.

CAM

By: OhioRob

OhioRob — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:37:57 +0000

Geno:
Do you have any TPC-H benchmarks to substantiate your throughput claims? Its always good to see a reputable independent source that performs consistent tests across multiple competing platforms. Without it, anybody can make any claim (eg. Oracle).

By: Kickfire’s FPGA-based technical strategy | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:35:59 +0000

[...] to imply. But in fact Kickfire just relies on standard chips, even if — like Netezza and XtremeData — Kickfire does rely on less programmer-friendly FPGAs to do some of what most rival vendors [...]

By: What does Netezza do in the FPGAs anyway, and other questions | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:52:47 +0000

[...] A recent discussion of the use of FPGAs for SQL operations in a post and comment thread around XtremeData’s product launch [...]

By: Geno Valente

Geno Valente — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:00:38 +0000

Having been in the FPGA industry almost since its infancy, I can say that people who need the “BEST” size, weight, and power (SWaP) use FPGAs, especially when it comes to bit, byte, character, string manipulations, or packet processing. Cisco, Nortel, EMC, Moto, Alcatel, GE, and about 20K other customers publicly say that they rely on them to many things that CPUs just can’t do fast enough or inside the SWaP envelop. If you pick “one thing”, then yes CPUs can approach being the same, but let’s take a full data pipeline example.

CPUs can do JOINs, they can do compression, they can do encryption, and they can do encryption, but how is their performance at all four on streaming data where the CACHE is basically useless? Not very good to say the least.

A FPGA pipeline could do DECOMPRESS (GZIP-9), DECRYPT (AES-XTS 256 bit by the way or elliptical curve), then JOIN, then RECRYPT, then RECOMPRESS at the same performance through-put because of the power of pipelining and parallelization of custom reprogrammable silicon. O’ya.. AND it gives a new result every clock cycle. A large FPGA in this case is a MEN vs BOYS discussion.

We have been doing a webinar series called “Acceleration Academy” for all of 2009. I can say that Intel, SGI, HP, Altera, and may others have been on it to support these claims. Large Tier 1 companies have “Accelerator Strategies” (namely XDI FPGA accelerators and nVidia GPGPUs). In addition, Intel and AMD both created accelerator programs, called QuickAssist and Torenza, that included our patented Accelerator Technology as one of, if not THE, first member. People who doubt the power of FPGAs should watch this series: http://www.xtremedata.com/accelerationacademy (click on past webinars) or read the hundreds of pier reviewed papers on the power FPGA technology.

Additionally, we have over 200 customers that use the same hardware platform as DBX to make their own accelerated appliances (Financial, Genomics, Military Radar, etc) that all say “ X86 + FPGAs” are the way to go… and yesterday TwinFin made the same move that we’ve been advocating since 2004. We have the only Tier 1 approved In-Socket FPGA solution in the world (which is patented), which tightly couples these two technologies together better than any other way. XtremeData Accelerators are approved as an official HP accelerator (www.hp.com/go/accelerators to see our name, white papers, and the HP/Xtreme join PodCast) . This status makes our platform mainstream, available with Tier 1support, and customer proven time and time again to do its job faster, with less, and in less space than CPU + software alone.

The power of FPGAs: This is one thing that the folks at Netezza and I agree on.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:06:49 +0000

I note that 1 terabyte/minute on 16 cores is a lot like the 1 gigabyte/second/core VectorWise talks about, e.g. http://www.dbms2.com/2009/08/04/vectorwise-ingres-and-monetdb/#comment-133810

They don’t think FPGAs are needed in addition to the cores, however.

Best,

CAM

By: Geno Valente

Geno Valente — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:15:31 +0000

@Jerome – Yes, I think you got it. Add to #1; that not just data movement, but also ” real SQL processing” while being moved at that rate.

In summary: this give 16 nodes (1 tower) the abilty to hold 60TB of user data and process SQL at 1TB/Min regardless of data partition / data key.

By: “The Netezza price point” | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:03:07 +0000

[...] XtremeData just launched in the new Netezza price range. [...]

By: Jerome Pineau

Jerome Pineau — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:09:21 +0000

@Geno: So the thing to take away from this interesting virtual WB session is
1. all data movement is at 1GB/sec
2. you’re nodal partition scheme agnostic
3. you’re “model agnostic”

Right?

By: Geno Valente

Geno Valente — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:30:07 +0000

We posted the next “ChalkTalk” today titled “Unconstrained Data Exploration”. It is fitting and answers some of the open questions related to data redistribution, how we do it, and etc.

http://www.xtremedata.com/unconstrained.php

More ChalkTalks coming soon.

If anyone has ideas for future chalk talks.. send me an email: gvalente (at) xtremedata (dot) com