(1) Affect of "fat servers" wiping out the small and midsized clusters. I've noticed that "fat servers" like the 64-core systems with 1TB RAM have decimated the small and midsized clusters. You can do in a single 4U box today what used to take a half-rack or much much more
(2) Affect of Hadoop/BigData on compute node configuration. We've noticed a potential trend in our vertical (life science) where cluster operators who need to make IT decisions now that have to live largely unchanged for 2-4 years are looking at future HDFS/Hadoop requirements and deciding to radically change their standard compute node footprint. We've seen people abandoning the 1U pizzabox form factor and Blades in favor of 4U servers that can be packed with local spindles in order to support future HDFS and hardcore local processing requirements (3) Storage is always a fun theme mainly because although compute is a commodity it's still easy to have massive and interesting price/performance/feature/architecture differences in the storage systems people choose to roll out My $.02 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
