Trango embeds virtualization tool in Cavium's multicore CPUs
PARIS – As part of a partnership with Cavium Networks Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), Trango Virtual Processors, French provider of embedded processor virtualization IP, announced it has enhanced its Hypervisor embedded virtualization technology for Cavium's Octeon multicore MIPS64 processor family.
Trango (Grenoble, France) claims its Hypervisor technology will provide Octeon processor customers "with high-availability, application reliability, user-data security, adaptive resource allocation, IO virtualization and power reduction" by creating on-demand Virtual Processors according to the dynamically changing workload of high-throughput intelligent communication, storage and security applications.
"There is a single hypervisor per core with an interprocessor communication stack," commented Frank Altschuler, Trango's marketing director, to EE Times Europe. "Thread management and process migration is handled through the hypervisor. Typically, you would have an executive whose task would consist in migrating processing tasks to the appropriate core. The supervisory task operates on a number of levels, including power management, fault tolerance, redundancy, maintenance attributes, as well as speed on unused cores. It is a very flexible mechanism."
In order to support aggressive power management, Trango said Virtual Processors can be migrated from core to core. The processing load is then spread across the available cores proportionally to the load with extra cores shut down in states as Virtual Processors are offloaded.
"Here the focus is on power management because it is the biggest advantage we bring to multicore," Altshuler stated. "It makes the layout much simpler. In a multicore design, you often have to do the relocation. Everything is statically locked in. That paradigm goes out of the window when using our solution because you can change the allocation dynamically on the fly."
Acknowledging competition with "an attempt from other companies to move to multicore", Altshuler asserted that Trango has "a jump in the market with a substantial advantage."
Indeed, Andry Ramiandrasoa, Trango's marketing and communication manager, stressed on the virtualization migration functionality. He declared: "One of our key differentiator is the ability to dynamically migrate Virtual Machines and to switch off unused core, thus the power consumption can exactly match the system needs at a given time."
Questioned on Trango's next technological frontier regarding power management, Altshuler said: "There are characteristics of the individual implementation that we would like to standardize so as to make it quicker and easier for the customers to take advantage of power management capabilities."
TRANGO expects that its Hypervisor product with a complete Eclipse-based tools suite, and customized engineering and consulting services for Cavium Networks’ Octeon multicore MIPS64 processor family will be available for shipment to customers in the first quarter of 2008. The price will be determined on a case by case basis, concluded Ramiandrasoa.
Loading comments... Write a comment