Talos II Secure Workstation
The Talos II mainboard is the first modern (post-2013), owner-controllable, workstation- and enterprise-class mainboard. Built around the brand-new IBM POWER9 processor, and leveraging GNU/Linux and OpenPOWER technology, Talos II allows you to secure your data without sacrificing performance. Designed with a fully owner-controlled CPU domain, you can audit and modify any portion of the open source firmware on the Talos II mainboard, all the way down to the CPU microcode. This is an unprecedented level of access for any modern workstation- or enterprise-class machine, and one that is increasingly needed to assure safety and compliance with new regulations, such as the EU’s GDPR.
An owner-controlled, CPU-based secure boot mode also is available at any time. When secure boot is properly configured, and if the mainboard is located in a physically secure environment (e.g., a datacenter or locked workstation case), you can be assured that only your pre-approved and pre-audited firmware, kernel, and user space components are executing on a Talos II system.
Talos II Secure Workstation including
- Heavy-duty chassis with power efficient power supply
- A single Talos II EATX mainboard
- Two 4-core IBM POWER9 v2 CPUs
- 4 cores per package
- SMT4 capable
- POWER IOMMU
- Hardware virtualization extensions
- 90W TDP
- One or two 3U POWER9 heatsink / fan (HSF) assemblies (same as CPU count)
- 32 GB DDR4 ECC registered memory (recommended, other options available)
- 8 hot-swap SAS/SATA drive bays (functionality requires SAS controller)
- 4 TB internal NVMe storage (optional, recommended)
- Front panel: 2 USB 3.0 ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports, audio out, microphone in
- Recovery DVD
Resources
NOTE: To provide maximal PCIe bandwidth for all peripherals, each slot is serviced by a dedicated CPU. As such, two CPUs are required to activate all PCIe slots on the Talos II mainboard.
NOTE: POWER HSF assemblies use a unique high-pressure locking mechanism to ensure proper CPU contact. The installed HSF assemblies will require a 5/32″ hex driver, such as our TL2HD1, for attachment and removal (available from the options).
NOTE: Product images shown are representative of the product being sold, but may vary slightly from the product as shipped due to continuous improvement and related changes.
Prof. Dr. Olaf Mersmann
My students and I use our Talos II machine every day. Most don’t realize that it is not a “normal” server but an OpenPOWER system.
We’re using the machine for the following:
1. jupyterhub server for the students
2. simulation calculations in practical projects and in research
3. gitlab runner for software tests on non-x86 hardware
4. web server for my lectures
Especially points 2 and 3 are exciting. I’m always amazed how well the POWER9 CPU can keep up with current AMD/Intel CPUs for simulation computations (lots of Python along with C/C++ and a little Fortran, no BLAS/LAPACK heavy computations). I.e. it is not *only* an open but also a powerful system.
We also have a long term software quality study going on, where we try building as many R packages (more or less everything on CRAN) as possible under ppc64le and ppc64be.
Lastly, one of the truly incredible things about POWER9 is how far down you can see what the hardware is doing. In this regard, IBM didn’t go all the way with the successor POWER10 — POWER9 remains the most interesting fully libre/open system on the market for now. I hope that in the next iteration, not only the ISA will remain open and license-free, but also the firmware components.
Prof. Dr. Olaf Mersmann
Technical University of Cologne, Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering Science, Germany