There are many reasons to make a scalable Workstation Architecture
A lot of workloads need multiple hosts and/or a huge load of peripherals to be connected and managed.
- Traditional Deskside Chassis and Rackmount Cases do not scale well and are physically constrained in terms of expansion options.
Being able to hook up a lot of Storage, Accelerators, Interfaces and other Expansions beyond the limits of classical Chassis configurations does have a lot of nieche applications that are underserved.
- For example to allow for commercial off-the-shelp designs in A/V production and broadcast as well as Rendering and CAD workloads.
This will keep costs down, increase adoption and enhance operability.
- By only specifying the necessities and allowing for maximum flexibility, the Systems Integrators can customize the Setup to the needs and constraints of it's Use-Case.
Use of Common, off-the-shelf standards and solutions.
This keeps costs for cases down whilst also providing means of mechanically mounting said components in a safe and secure manner.
- Components are seperated in their rackmounted enclosures so repairs and upgrades are easy to facilitate and compliance with RF- & spectrum regulations are trivial to met, as every subcomponents complies, so no need to certify the entire rack newly.
This reduces the need for multiple power supplies whilst also easing integration into varying electricity Standards and Setups as well as UPSes and Redundency.
- Utilizing OpenCompute Power Systems to allow for high-density yet affordable systems.
- 48V DC is a good compromise on complexity, voltage, amperage and provides easy means to downshift to any desired voltage as needed.
Centralized Airflow and liquid cooling system
In line with rackmount conventions, the System will pull in cool ambient air from the front and exhaust hot air to the rear.
- A Massive radiator at the rear is being used to utilize a high-pressure & high-flow rate cooling solution to keep components at reasonable temperatures.
- Spill-free couplings allow for the addition or removal of units with ease.
- Using Propan-1-ol as coolant at ambient pressure allows for a wide temperature range of -100°C - 80°C.
- Alternatively, use of Water at subambient pressure may yield options for two-phase systems but is disrecommended due to the vacuum requirement and the safety issues re: electronics.
- However the specification isn't fixed yet so a boiling liquid cooling loop may still be in the cards.
- Support for external cooling loops via a shell and tube heat exchanger is easily possible with the design, so whole-room watercooling and other central heat managment solutions can be used, which reduce inefficiencies through conversion compared to A/C -> Ambient Air.
- Immersion-based liquid cooling has been discarded as of yet due to compatibility issues with components.
- The lack of easy access to good cooling fluids certified for that use-case and subsequent costs of the system make it a more expensive solution that is harder to maintain and integrate by virtue of being not compatible with existing solutions.
- The ability to put an UltraStation deskside like a traditional High-End Workstation is key to it's useability and accessibility.
- The lack of easy access to good cooling fluids certified for that use-case and subsequent costs of the system make it a more expensive solution that is harder to maintain and integrate by virtue of being not compatible with existing solutions.
(Optical) PCI Express - based Interconnect
Using SFF-8644 Connectors to allow for transparent PCIe cabling solutions.
- This allows the use of cheap off-the-shelf adaptors as well as copper and espechally active optical cables to interconnect the components.
- Optical Cabling also prevents Common-Mode interferenceor CMI and thus reduces risks of electrical faults and failures, enabling a higher density of highspeed connections closer without interfering each other.
PCI Express Switched "Backplane"
Using a Switch for the high-speed PCIe-based interconnect between modules provides a transparent yet efficient way to access multiple peripherals beyond the amount of directly interconnectable lanes.
- This also allows for multiple-host/targets to be used and provide a more stable option than the low-end narrowband solutions used in many cases. Hosts use PCIe HBA Adaptors to be integrated.
- Similar, but transparent Adaptors are to be used for Target Devices aka. Chassis with PCIe Hardware in them.
Utilizing PoE and Gigabit Ethernet to manage modules, backplanes and hosts with ease.
- This also allows for Lights-Out-Managment of components and thus "warm-swapping" of components not designed to be hot-swappable. Devices are being allocated and deallocated by the Hosts using CLI tools to allow for real, guaranteed-rate I/O and exclusive, blocking access, so they'll be gracefully added and removed to the system.
This is one of the main inspirations for the UltraStation.
- A scalable yet modular System Architecture that allows for reconfiguration and upgrades of the System.
For those interested in it, Dodroid made an excellent video about it to checkout.
SN1 / SN-MIPS-based Systems like the Onyx3000.
There has been a trademark for the name UltraStation which lapsed in 2005 under the Register DE39550110.
At the time of it's release, this was the Ultimate CPU in terms of benchmarked performance.