AWS developed ASIC (Application-Specific Interface Card) hardware, Nitro ‘cards’, to replace these DMs and run their functions faster. The Xen hypervisor uses the server CPUs to run the VMM and DM software, taking up CPU cycles. The VMM dealt with many of these requests by passing them to software routines called device models (DMs) to handle tasks such as sending data across a network to a different server or accessing storage. A VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) function receives calls from the VM for network and storage IO and similar system-level requests. When the EC2 service launched in 2006 AWS used Xen Paravirtualization for its physical servers to enable and support its VMs. As Metricly blogger Mike Mackrory said ” EC2 is a Service of Virtual Machines.” AWS EC2 compute users have their applications run as Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) in virtual machines (VM) on a server. The Nitro hardware deserves a closer look and its origin needs putting in context. The cluster has to do less work on it because of the pre-processing, and can offload certain sub-query processing to the AQUA nodes. The result is that less data is sent to the Redshift cluster. Aggregating provides summing, counts, average values and so forth of records in a data set. Filtering removes unwanted information from a data set to create a sub-set. The FPGA hardware does dataset filtering and aggregation. AQUA modules scale out as needed and operate simultaneously. The AQUA module hardware consists of FPGAs to run customised analytics routines and AWS Nitro chips.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |