On March 24, Alibaba Cloud announced the official launch of a new generation of enterprise-level elastic computing instance family ECS g8i, which has two distinctive advantages of ultra-high performance and comprehensive security protection.
From the perspective of key performance parameters, the all-core turbo frequency p0n of the g8i instance reaches 3.2GHz. Compared with the previous generation instance, the core density of the whole machine is increased by 50%, and the maximum performance is increased by more than 60%. The network is equipped with Alibaba Cloud's self-developed eRDMA large-scale acceleration capability as standard, and the latency is as low as 8 microseconds; the storage is fully equipped with NVMe, supports shared disks, and the storage latency is as low as 100 microseconds. At the same time, g8i supports features such as trusted computing and encrypted computing, default memory encryption (TME), and is the first in the world to support TDX confidential virtual machine capabilities.
Zhang Xiantao, head of Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing product line, said that the official launch of Alibaba Cloud's eighth-generation enterprise-level instance g8i marks the full commercialization of Alibaba Cloud's self-developed CIPU architecture and its latest feature, eRDMA capability, which will greatly improve data processing efficiency. . With the powerful combination of Alibaba Cloud CIPU+ Feitian technology architecture and the 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor, the performance of the g8i specification family has increased by 60%, and the first practice of the confidential virtual machine capability TDX on the cloud is believed to be The continuous and close cooperation between the two parties will bring more cost-effective technical dividends to more customers in various industries.
This instance adopts the "Feitian + CIPU" technical architecture, and is oriented to industries such as games, live video broadcasting, e-commerce, finance, medical care, and enterprise services, and meets the growing performance requirements in application scenarios such as databases, big data, and AI reasoning.
As an enterprise-level instance, ultra-high performance is the most prominent advantage of the g8i instance, which is inseparable from Alibaba Cloud's self-developed CIPU: a dedicated processor for cloud data centers - a dedicated processor designed for the "Flying" operating system. Relying on the technical architecture of CIPU+Apsara, the g8i instance network and storage I/O have been greatly improved.
CIPU has the industry's first large-scale elastic RDMA acceleration capability. eRDMA and VPC on the cloud share the same network, and users can open and use instances with eRDMA capabilities at any time; existing applications such as Redis, Spark, AI, and HPC are provided through Alibaba Cloud. The interface can be adapted with one click, which minimizes the difficulty of use by enterprises.
In the AI deep learning scenario, eRDMA can improve the training performance of large-scale distributed NLP and visual computing by 30%; in the Spark big data scenario, eRDMA can improve the computing performance by 10%; in the Redis KV database scenario, eRDMA can improve mixed reading and writing 100% throughput.
In terms of storage, it is fully equipped with NVMe, supports shared disks, and has storage latency as low as 100 microseconds. NVMe cloud disks have high reliability, high performance, and rich enterprise features. It is based on the NVMe standard protocol, which has lower latency and higher throughput than ordinary cloud disks. Its multi-instance mounting function based on the NVMe protocol will also greatly facilitate the high-availability business of enterprises to the cloud. NVMe cloud disk will gradually become the main cloud disk of ECS cloud server, and will continue to enrich features and build ecology around the NVMe protocol to provide users with more value.
In addition, the eighth-generation ECS instance provides a variety of hardware native acceleration capabilities on the basis of the single-core general-purpose computing power improvement, which can further improve application performance. Among them, relying on the AMX AI accelerator, the performance of g8i deep learning training scenarios has been increased by more than 2 times, and the reasoning performance has been increased by 4 times; the QAT accelerator has increased the performance of scenarios such as encryption and decryption, compression/decompression by more than 4 times; The workload performance has more than doubled compared to the previous generation.
As the earliest cloud provider in the Asia-Pacific region to deploy confidential computing, Alibaba Cloud has been continuously promoting trusted and confidential computing technologies to provide better protection for customers' data.
All ECS g8i instances are equipped with security chip TPM as the hardware root of trust. On the basis of instance trust, combined with Intel hardware TEE capability and memory encryption TME (Intel® Total Memory Encryption) Business scenarios such as intellectual property provide higher security level data protection capabilities. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud and Intel launched the practice of the confidential virtual machine TDX (Intel® Trusted Domain Extension), realizing the global debut of TDX technology. Alibaba Cloud believes that this technology will promote the generalization and popularization of confidential computing, and together with trusted technology, it will become the standard capability of future cloud servers.
