SeaMicro, Inc. was a subsidiary of

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

that specialized in the ultra-dense computer server industry. It ceased operations on 16 April 2015.

History

In July 2007, Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, and Anil Rao founded SeaMicro. Series A investments from

Crosslink Capital Crosslink Capital is a leading early-stage venture capital firm with an asset management business that continues into the public equity market for fast-growing companies. The firm has over $2.0B assets under management that it invests in consu ...

and

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...

closed in December 2007.

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successfu ...

led the series B investment round in 2009. In 2012, SeaMicro was acquired by AMD for $334 million. The application of MicroSea servers were most prominent in

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

s, such as the Gene Center at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich for scientific research. In 2013, SeaMicro AMD collaborated with

Verizon Communications Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas i ...

to power their new cloud services. It has empowered Verizon to introduce fine-grained server configuration options that allow for more flexibility in instance-sizing by allowing administrators to select a processor speed between 500 MHz and 2 GHz and to scale DRAM up and down in 512 MB increments.

Products

The first product from SeaMicro was the SM10000, along with the SM10000-XE, which achieved Red Hat Certification in 2011 when operating on

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version ...

. A more recent model, The SeaMicro SM15000 was also designed to support

Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...

Xen Servers,

VMware ESXi VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); ...

software, and both

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s. Specifications of newer versions have reached computing benchmarks of 5

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s of storage, 64 CPUs, a 1,000

Virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

capacity, and 1.28

Tb/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

.> Another product of interest is the 10U Rack Unit, which can provide a total of 2,048 CPU cores, and 16 TBs of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

and data is transferred through a custom "Freedom Fabric" for supercomputers unique to SeaMicro microservers.

Awards

* GigaOM: GreenNet 2011: 10 Big Ideas Winners * Silicon Valley/ San Jose Journal: Best Emerging Cleantech Company 2011 * 2011 Best Electronic Design Winners: Computer Category * Platts: 2011 Rising Star award

References

External links

*
Architectural tradeoffs in the Sea Micro SM 10000 Server
- Talk given at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

by SeaMicro founder & CTO, Gary Lauterbach.
video archive
{{AMD 2007 establishments in California 2012 mergers and acquisitions 2015 disestablishments in California AMD Computer storage devices Supercomputers Servers (computing) Ultra-dense servers American companies established in 2007 American companies disestablished in 2015