SeaMicro, Inc. was a subsidiary of AMD 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 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 succe ...

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 centers, 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 in ...

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 software, commercial Open-source software, open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commerce, commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-6 ...

. 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 i ...

and Microsoft Windows

Operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

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

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

s, 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 har ...

capacity, and 1.28 Tb/s of bandwidth.> Another product of interest is the 10U Rack Unit, which can provide a total of 2,048 CPU cores, and 16 TBs of RAM 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 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