Bringing up Cosmo

Oxide is bringing up its next generation server. To discuss the (amazingly smooth) bringup process, Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the oxide team. Tales of adversity, re-work, un-re-work, and triumph!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues Nathanael Huffman, Ian Sobering, Matt Keeter, and Aaron Hartwig.

We mentioned quite a few terms! Here's a helpful guide:

• Cosmo - Oxide’s next-generation sled (currently in development) with an AMD Turin CPU
• Gimlet - Oxide’s current-generation sled with an AMD Milan CPU
• Turin - AMD Epyc 9005 Series
• Milan - AMD Epyc 7003 Series
• Genoa - AMD Epyc 9004 Series (Oxide chose to skip this generation)
• Sequencing - the precise control of when power rails are energized throughout a PCB
• Sled - One of the (max 32) computers in an Oxide rack; a custom form-factor optimized for power and cooling efficiency
• IBC - Intermediate Bus Converter (Our 54VDC -> 12VDC converter)
• RoT - Root of Trust
• SP - Service Processor, the small computer (running Hubris) that allows for low-level control
• Ignition - An even lower-level control network for power management (including power of the SP)
• Ruby - The AMD reference platform (Oxide has used this to prepare Cosmo software in advance of bringup)
• DC-SCM - https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-dc-scm-spec-rev-1-0-pdf and OpenCompute standard form factor.
• Grapefruit - OCP DC-SCM form-factor board with our SP, RoT, and FPGA on it, used to replace the OCP DC-SCM baseboard management controller in the Ruby platform.
• Cadence - Software Oxide previously used for PCB design
• Altium - Software Oxide now uses for PCB design
• Hubris - Oxide’s embedded operating system, run on the SP and RoT
• Humility - The Hubris debugger
• PLM - Product Lifecycle Management – a class of software used for managing hardware BOMs
• BOM - Bill of Materials – the components required to build a hardware product
• RFK - Our colleague, Robert Keith (to distinguish him from our other colleague, Robert, and our former colleague, Keith)
• FPGA - Field Programmable Gate Array – Also referred to as “soft logic” – effectively programmable hardware
• ILA - Integrated Logic Analyzer
• JTAG - A debugging interface for various processors
• UART - A serial port or connection

For previous tales from the bringup lab:

• Tales from the bringup lab
• More tales from the bringup lab
• Bringup Lab Chronicles: A Measurement Two Years in the Making
• Raiding the Minibar

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!