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Article by Ernie Bergstrom, President of Crystal Cube Consulting, and chairperson of the PICMG GEN4 Open Server Summit sessions

How will your organization be developing high-performance embedded hardware 10 years from now?  Surely you’ll want a mature open modular standard with far greater capabilities than systems have today!  And you’ll want one that has support for today’s advanced features built-in, can handle a wide variety of applications, is maintainable and upgradable, and has a large ecosystem.  If you want that standard to be widely available, we must start to define it today.

PICMG GEN4 is a proposed new specification for high-performance embedded computing.  It will provide an open modular standard for high-end applications in telecom, datacom, military/aerospace, industrial/process control, and instrumentation.  It will offer new levels of compute, storage, and networking capabilities with throughput in the terabit range and storage in the exabyte range.  It will support such key demands as software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), cloud computing, and cybersecurity.

GEN4 will obviously provide the highest performance of any embedded specification developed so far.  Not only will it include the latest technology, but it will also have a proven backer in PICMG with 20 years experience in specification development. PICMG provides continued support and development from both vendors and customers.  And all its specifications are non-proprietary with strong disclosure policies on intellectual property.  None of PICMG’s 55 standards requires a license to implement.

PICMG is a 20-year old industry organization that has focused on developing open modular standards for embedded computing.   Its latest high-end standard, AdvancedTCA, had over 100 organizations involved in its development (completed in 2002).  It is currently supported by over 1,000 vendors and has a $5 billion dollar annual market.  PICMG has over 250 members worldwide, including AMD, Agilent, Airbus, BAE Systems, Cisco, Ericsson, General Dynamics C4S, Huawei, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mentor Graphics, Mercury Computer, National Instruments, NetApp, Northrop Grumman, Nokia Solutions and Networks, Raytheon, Sandia National Laboratories, TE Connectivity, Thales Global Services, and ZTE

Why should telecom, military, and instrumentation developers be interested in a PICMG GEN4 specification?  Our findings showed that it will provide a standard hardware base, greatly simplifying hardware development and maintenance while avoiding proprietary approaches.  It will offer the high throughput required for central office equipment, wireless basestations, military communications systems, fire control, signal processing, electronic warfare, robotics, vehicles, detection systems, and many other applications.  It will include hardware platform management for use in maintenance and upgrades.  It is the latest in a family of specifications that have enjoyed wide acceptance, large markets, and major ecosystems involving hundreds of vendors and thousands of products.  GEN4 offers an open modular hardware base for systems developed and in use through the 2020’s.

Finally, organizations can join PICMG at low cost, entitling them to participate in all existing committees and form new ones. The GEN4 specification development will start late this year and will involve weekly committee calls.  We expect the process to take between two and three years.  Members can form new committees to develop parallel or ancillary specifications to meet specific environmental or mechanical needs, handle certification requirements, and create special capabilities (such as for highly secure, highly available, or vertical applications).  PICMG is sponsoring a free kickoff meeting at the Open Server Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center (Santa Clara, CA) on November 13, 2014.  For more information, see www.picmg.org or www.openserversummit.com.

Ernie Bergstrom is President of Crystal Cube Consulting, and chairperson of the PICMG GEN4 Open Server Summit sessions You can reach him at [email protected].

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Justin Moll, Director of Marketing, VadaTech and Chair of the 40GbE over MicroTCA Committee

MicroTCA has very powerful and compelling features, especially in the realm of system management. The more advanced the features are, the most complex the process can become. This is one of the reasons why the Interoperability Workshops (IWs) are so important.

One of the key benefits of MicroTCA is that the interoperability of the ecosystem was built into the specification from the beginning, not patched-on at a later date like some other architectures. However, there are always subtleties to ensure optimum performance that need to be reviewed. Plus, there are plenty features of Hardware Platform Management, etc., to test. These include power channel notifications, power budgeting management, redundancy testing, RTM management, and more.

The results of the IWs are kept confidential, but I can say that the participant’s products worked very well together in the workshop held Oct 4-6 at the VadaTech facility in Henderson, NV. Any minor bugs/issues are discussed between the parties and quickly addressed to ensure the smoothest operation of interoperable systems. We look forward to continuing these important workshops as the MicroTCA ecosystem continues to rapidly expand with new MicroTCA.4 systems, 40G products emerge, a wealth of new digitizers and FPGA’s hit the market, and much more!

While PICMG and its members are committed to the future of ATCA, we recognize that at some time in the future a new, platform that may not be backwards compatible with ATCA may be needed.

A PICMG working group is already defining the requirements for this new platform, which will be called GEN4™.

The GEN4 architecture will be optimized for very high performance computation and network modular platform applications that are beyond the capacities of current AdvancedTCA systems. It will be targeted at high performance computing, central network, network edge, and high capacity storage applications with critical capacity, performance, reliability, density, and efficiency requirements. The explosive growth of Internet traffic (especially driven by video, big data, and the WEB 3.0) will require the deployment of much more capable network elements and will require that they be deployed rapidly. As datacenter and telecommunications networks converge, and cloud computing and various heterogeneous processing models become prevalent, GEN4 will be positioned as the standard modular platform architecture of choice.

GEN4 will be scalable in computational power, networking bandwidth, and storage capacity.

GEN4 will be a new architecture which is complementary to AdvancedTCA. While the boards and shelves will not be plug compatible, the software and management infrastructure elements will be adaptable between architectures. GEN4 will achieve order of magnitude levels of improvement over original PICMG 3.0 R1.0 systems in multiple dimensions, including:

• Architected with energy efficiency, simplicity, and scalability goals set by emerging market demands.
• Module size for high-capacity networking and compute performance using off-the-shelf silicon.
• System throughput (to hundreds of terabits/s), module bandwidth (to tens of terabits/s), and storage capacity in exabytes.
• Efficient power delivery with High Voltage DC options as well as AC
• Module cooling capacity (over 2000 Watts, with fluid cooling options)
• Scalability to efficiently create large multi-frame systems
• Cybersecurity at the lowest level of the hardware architecture to address secure military communications applications.

GEN4 will be a new approach to address the widely varying performance needs of the applications through hierarchy of increasing capability subsystems, supporting SDN and NFV, while providing investment protection for customers with deployed AdvancedTCA systems. And like all PICMG platforms, it will be an open, public standard that anyone can implement.

GEN4 systems will provide the capacity and density required by the next decade of Internet application and traffic growth, serving the modular platform marketplace from 2015 through at least 2025.