On Monday 29 March 2010 01:26:41 Joseph Apuzzo wrote: > The point was the "distributed" projects of replacing cloud services like > Facebook, Twitter, etc with "always on" 1w servers in the home. That was in > the article... I thought that the idea of replacing the "cloud" with many > 1w small servers could be a MHVLUG project thing. By distributing > service(s) across many locations and members, we could then have our own > distributed development platform. I guess it would only work on a massive > scale ( 2,000 - 1 Million ) not 12 modules > > Joe
The ShivaPlug website hints that lots of ShivaPlugs could be the equivalent of a server room, but I think that's bunk. This type of embedded computer just doesn't have enough I/O, storage, or RAM to make it of general use. Using the onboard Flash for storage means using the JFFS2 filesystem which has several limitations -- it's a compressed filesystem, and because compression level varies by file, it means not knowing how much space is left on the disk. JFFS2 also needs to do garbage collection as well as compression, both of which means accessing storage is slow. And the big whopper is if you accidentally corrupt the filesystem, thus "bricking" the device. The first serial port on the ShivaPlug is for JTAG use, which if you have JTAG hardware can let you have direct access to the Flash and hopefully fix it -- but it's a lot simpler to deal with devices that use external storage like SD or CF cards. And as things stand right now, most programs haven't caught up to dealing with multi-core SMP processors, let alone try to spread any kind of load over lots of small embedded devices over a network. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Apr 7 - Nagios May 5 - Crack and LLVM Jun 2 - Android
