EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2022 – Congatec

Embedded computing reaches edge server space

Dan Demers, General Manager Americas, congatec

Rugged servers are a major megatrend in 2022 and beyond

2022 will be the year of embedded server technologies. For Dan Demers, General Manager Americas at congatec, there’s no doubt about it. Semiconductor manufacturers will bring new powerful server CPUs onto the market. Embedded vendors such as congatec will implement them immediately on the brand new COM-HPC Server-on-Module standard recently released by standardization body PICMG. As these new server modules provide a significant performance leap over previous modules, OEMs will be able to completely open up y new edge server applications for their customers.

The big trend during the last decades saw PC technologies moving deeper and deeper into embedded applications. First, it was x86 low power desktop and notebook processors, later ARM based processors designed for smartphones and tablets. With Linux support for both ARM and x86 application processors, freely programmable applications are now available for nearly all devices. And IP communication standards as well as wireless technologies make it possible to intelligently connect almost everything. Smart products available today range from relatively simple temperature sensors to control heating systems, to WLAN based light switches and smart bulbs for the smart home sector. And the same trend towards IP based connectivity is happening across all the various industry sectors. Starting with IP based gateways for machines, devices and controls, it reaches deep into the industrial field with its IP based industrial Ethernet communication that includes TSN and IP technologies to connect peripheral devices and all the various established industrial field busses and serial interfaces.

What is needed now are smart controls to supervise the various dedicated process controllers and orchestrate all the distributed IP devices to enable smart factories and make critical infrastructures more intelligent, secure and safe. This orchestration requires massive computing performance. Server technologies are the technology platforms capable to execute these tasks. But neither industrial environments nor critical infrastructures nor mobile machines provide air conditioned server rooms. This calls for embedded server technologies that are designed to perform in rugged environments and guarantee long term availability to meet the requirements of industrial OEMs who expect uninterrupted uptime for their installations and a lifecycle far beyond that of standard servers. The minimum required availability is 7 years but often, 10 to 15 years are demanded.

Chip vendors such as Intel and AMD have identified this market as growth drivers for their business, which means we will see quite impressive launches this year. Embedded and edge computing vendors will implement these processors in designs that meet the needs of dedicated rugged server configurations. The platform technology for these servers has already been defined by the standardization body PICMG, which focusses on global specifications for the embedded and industrial computing sector. A major benefit of the new Server-on-Module standard for edge server designs, COM-HPC, is that OEMs can reduce their own non-recurring engineering costs as the core server component comes as an application ready super-component with pre-integrated processor, memory and interfaces. As an added bonus, these modules are fully interchangeable within the same standard and footprint. With COM-HPC Server modules, OEMs therefore gain from a vendor independent approach with second source and long-term investment security for their dedicated product designs. Another benefit is the performance scalability of these modules, which makes them perfectly suited for entire product families and even to retro-fit designs that need a new processor implementation due to obsolescence of the original processor after 7 to 15 years. The only thing OEMs have to do is change the COM-HPC Server module.

Application ready Server-on-Modules based on the COM-HPC standard will be the major innovation accelerator in 2022

But orchestrating the Industrial IoT is not only a question of deploying server processor performance on highly efficient and rugged Server-on-Module based platforms. Software also plays a major role in this sector as we will see many configurations that must bundle a large number of diverse tasks. With container technologies this may be feasible for standard applications not requiring real-time operation. But for heterogeneous real-time tasks that can be found in various industries – such as robotics, automation, medical, transportation, mobile machine and logistic vehicles markets as well as critical infrastructures in oil, gas, energy and networking applications – edge servers need to be capable to support heterogeneous setups with various real-time virtual machines operating independently from each other on one single edge server platform. So, one major accelerator for COM-HPC Server-on-Module deployments will be the capability to offer appropriate setups to help OEMs operate various real-time controls on one single edge server platform.

congatec supports real-time hypervisor technology from Real-Time Systems that enables the operation of several heterogeneous real-time virtual machines on one single server platform

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Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2022 at 4:17 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.