inactive-useron Lobsters • Recommends
The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer
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#oxidecomputercompany#bryancantrill#risc-v
Stanford Seminar - The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer
Stanford Online
1.3M subscribers • 34 videos on Hallway • University channel
- Recommended by 4 people: 3 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
- Presented by Bryan Cantrill, co-founder of Oxide Computer Company
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
76K views6 years ago4 recommendations
Systems programmingHardwareCPUs and computer architectureOperating systemsRust
Bryan Cantrill discusses Oxide Computer Company's vision for rack-scale servers built with open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust.
Bryan Cantrill Oxide Computer Company February 26, 2020 While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision. View the full playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu ► Check out our entire catalog of courses and programs: online.stanford.edu/exploreWhy it's here
4 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended for its deep dive into the history of server architecture and Oxide's mission to bring hyperscale hardware to the mass market.
steveklabnikon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company”
So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like link to this video > Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? I think "quality" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers. I will have to delegate the details to the above talk; I have a bunch of work to get started on, and would just end up re-typing out what it says above, ha!
steveklabnikon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video]”
The sibling comment is good. The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out on this slide: link to this video The business is "we will be selling servers." You can't buy any yet, but in the future, you'll be able to. The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the problems with the servers that you can buy from vendors today, and lays out why we think we can build better ones.
bcantrillon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Jensen Huang’s vision for data center dominance may destroy the Arm ecosystem”
For whatever it's worth, the talk I gave at Stanford in February1 goes into (much) more detail -- and given some of your other comments here, you will find many aspects of the talk educational. 1 link to this video
bcantrillon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Rust After the Honeymoon”
Sorry if that's a bit thin; more detail on what we're doing and why can be found in a (pre-COVID) talk I gave at Stanford1. We're definitely not a Deep Stealth company, but we've also been very busy building; expect many more details over the coming year! 1 link to this video
bcantrillon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Compensation as a Reflection of Values”
…t had a lot of problems too2 -- so we're trying not to recreate those! ;) Thank you for the kind words on the podcast -- very much looking forward to getting back in the garage and recording some new episodes! Finally, on Spring: yes, I need to find it (we just moved) and then find a CD-ROM drive (feels easier) and then I'll get it uploaded! 0 link to this video 1 link 2 link…
panick21_on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Kerla: Monolithic kernel in Rust, aiming for Linux ABI compatibility”
I think its an FPGA with a costume Open-Source Titan chip on it (RISC-V). It is not really a traditional BMC, its more like a service processor that does secure boot and gets you in the OS. It does a few other things but I think they really want it to have minimum functionality. This is a great talk about what they do and why: link to this video
mapgrepon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?”
Their co founder Bryan Cantrill gave a talk at Stanford on what they are trying to do, essentially offer on prem servers comparable to what “hyperscalers” like Google and Facebook put in their data centers — highly efficient and customizable (in low level software) iirc. link to this video
twicon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company”
It seems that video has been posted to HN twice, but didn't attract any comments either time, sadly. I don't have the energy to watch a 90 minute talk, but some skipping around finds a bit more detail about what is in the plan: link to this video The theme seems to be giving the operator of the computer a lot more control - eliminating opaque binary blobs, exposing the hardware more directly, etc. I can't tell if this is a particular bee in the founders' bonnets, or a real market demand, or if they know about some scary threat they can't talk about. Whilst this is definitely cool, and something that will get a lot of people on HN super pumped, it doesn't sound like something any company i have worked a…
bcantrillon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Requests for Discussion”
…were stored as AsciiDoc and every modification appeared as a git commit (and the comments themselves were also tracked via a git commit), that would almost assuredly be better than the GitHub + custom infrastructure we've built. But already having outrageously broad ambition, we drew the line at not reinventing design document management... ;) 1 link to this video…
ksecon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022”
May be instead of asking target market or audience, who are their competitors? (Edit: Previous Discussions link ) Also thinking if the Website is not finished? All the "Read More" actually hide very little information, if so why hide it? And doesn't seems to explain the company very well. Seems like we need to listen to their PodCast to find out what is going on. ( Edit: Found a Youtube Video about it link to this video ) >Get the most efficient power rating and network speeds of 100GBps without the pain of cable 100GBps would be impressive, 100Gbps would be ... not much? A interesting thing is all the terminal like graphics are actually HTML/CSS and not images.
sanderjdon Hacker News • Mentions
On “So You Want to Rust the Linux Kernel?”
Coincidentally I was just watching this talk from Bryan Cantrill: link to this video . Around the 58 minute mark he shares an anecdote that is relevant to this thread. It boils down to him doing something where he would have written a simple bespoke balanced binary tree in C, but when writing a reimplementation in Rust used a "naive" library approach and was surprised to see a 35% speedup, which boiled down to the library using a btree instead of a balanced binary tree. This doesn't invalidate your point about there being use cases for binary trees that may necessitate you to write your own, I take you at your word that you've often had strong use cases for this, but I do think it illustrates something…
zerdon Hacker News • Mentions
On “What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla”
Bryan Cantrill mentions in this talk that they saw no correctable errors, until they suddenly got uncorrectable errors. Turns out that the firmware was hiding the fact that it had been correcting ECC errors the whole time. link to this video
panick21_on Hacker News • Mentions
On “Oxide builds servers as they should be [audio]”
This company was created because somebody that actually built a large could with Dell/Supermicro suffered years and years of pain. If you do as you suggest you will have to do a whole lot more, at the minimum you need to set-up (and pay) VMWare. Then you will need to figure out how you do automated firmware upgrades, low level monitoring and if security is a concern you likely want to configure secure booting with attestation and things like that. Consider how much work it is to do what you suggest, vs buying this rack. And then consider how good (and repeatable) the end result is. That is at least the theory, see: link to this video
bcantrillon Hacker News • Mentions
On “RIP Usenix ATC”
Oh no! I had honestly never heard of EE380 when they asked me to present0, but I really appreciated the fact that it was (either implicitly or explicitly?) open to the public. I wish I had heard of it earlier, and sorry to see it go! 0 link to this video