Score:0

What kind of server has 416 cores?

kr flag
Ant

I was looking for something completely unrelated and found the gcloud m2-node-416-11776 which apparently has 416 cores and up to 12TiB of Memory.

I then did some digging and found the Azure Mv2-series with the M416ms v2 being the biggest one of them which also has 416 cores and 12 TiB of Memory.

The Google machines only say that they use skylake CPUs, the Azure ones say that the CPUs are Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180M CPUs, which according to Intel have 56 cores.

Now, 416 cores are not easily divided into 56 core CPUs, I figured that there might be 13x 32 Core CPUs in there but that also doesn't really fit my logic.

There are some high memory instances at AWS as well, but they offer 448 CPU Cores, which more evenly divides between the hyperthreaded 56 core CPUs. Do Microsoft and Google disable some cores? And if yes, why?

So now I want to know what type of servers they use and how the CPU configuration is set up.

djdomi avatar
za flag
You know what they use large clusters which can have any count of CPUs and any Value of RAM? They could also give you 2048 core and 1 PB RAM but no one would have a pretty use of this - thinked about this? :-) (its meant in generally)
Ant avatar
kr flag
Ant
What do you mean @djdomi ? The Servers I linked are almost all single tenant servers, so they are dedicated hardware.
djdomi avatar
za flag
It doesnt mean that they are dedicated Harrdware as you can see that they call it vCPU - however even you can look [here](https://www.crn.com/news/data-center/new-intel-xeon-platinum-9200-server-packs-7-616-cores-in-a-rack) where as example xeon cpu's can be stacked to a higher count
Michael Hampton avatar
cz flag
The n2 node you linked has 224 HT cores for a total of 448 possible vCPUs. Why Google only allow 416 of them to be used is indeed a mystery.
Michael Hampton avatar
cz flag
@djdomi We're talking about Google's offerings here.
cn flag
Where is it stated that they are single tenant? I suspect they are not. They are selling VMs after all and single-tenant options tends to be a separate more expensive offering.
Michael Hampton avatar
cz flag
@HåkanLindqvist That's what "Sole tenant nodes" means!
cn flag
@MichaelHampton The only reference to sole/single tenant on the page is a disclaimer that the pricing is different for that option and other mentions of that being an option.
Ant avatar
kr flag
Ant
@HåkanLindqvist the linked page for the gcloud m2-node-416-11776 has a sole tenant explanation at the top https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/nodes/sole-tenant-nodes#node_types
cn flag
I thought the question was about the `gcloud m2-ultramem-416` instance type? Which does not seem to be tied to the option of buying sole-tenant nodes at all?
Michael Hampton avatar
cz flag
The page is even _titled_ "Sole-tenant nodes"!
cn flag
Ok, the question is about `m2-node-416-11776`, not the instance type. I finally understand what you are talking about. I would suggest trying to make the question more clear by focusing more on that rather than referencing different instance types
cn flag
@MichaelHampton Just for clarity, that is not the page I was looking at, as I did not realize which one out of the many links actually related to the question until later.
Ant avatar
kr flag
Ant
Sorry for the confusion, I deleted the vm instance out of the question.
cn flag
The math for the `m2-node-416-11776` node type seems clear, though? They explicitly say 8 sockets, 28 cores per socket, making up 224 cores (448 threads with HT) on the hardware side. But also that you get 416 vCPUs.
djdomi avatar
za flag
And i think they reserve some for the OS itself for Managing
Score:3
cn flag

A big box, possibly for scale up.

Google Cloud's sole tenant page explicitly states m2-node-416-11776 is 8 sockets x 28 core Skylake. Note that Intel can ship custom CPU SKUs that aren't available at retail. However these is probably Platinum 8176.

Hypervisor overheads take up multiple CPUs full time at this scale. At least if response time is a priority at high utilization. 224 cores available minus 208 cores for guests (I prefer to count physical CPUs and not threads) is 16 cores not available for guests, about 7%. Two reserved cores per socket. Possibly conservative, although on the other hand I wouldn't want to cut that in half.

Azure M416ms v2 isn't documented as a sole tenant node, rather it is an enormous VM. I would hope paying that much rents you a similar dedicated 224 core box.

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