> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of Robert Brockway > > Hi Edward. Within HPC it's been standard for many years to run a large > number of relatively cheap boxes to processes highly parallelizable > workloads. > > A lot of sites will use nothing more than racks and racks of cheap dell > servers.
I am aware of this. I've been a long time user and supporter of dells and custom built blackboxes, workstations and servers, running usually linux of various kinds, clustered via SGE. We're talking a whole new scale here. 512 atom processors in a 10u formfactor, consuming 2kw, for $200 each. Looking quickly at dell, it's not difficult to get down to $200 per core, 4 cores in 1U. But you're going to fit at most 40 cores into 10u, and it will still consume 2kw of power at that scale. The root concept is: Break away from the assumption of xeon or equivalent amd processors. Jump down to the super small, super low-power, super cheap class of processors, atom, arm, etc... and use them to beat the xeons for some situations, such as distributed work load, or server virtualization. The cost to purchase is approximately equal (as far as I can tell) but the power and density are improved by an order of magnitude each, compared against "standard" servers. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
