Hmmm, Pipermail seems to have neglected to send me your reply. I saw it in
the archives. As far as the kernel goes, I am still nailing down the
config. I did see that OpenSuse now has Cubox support and I am looking at
that config. it is based on a 3.3.0-rc5 kernel, but I may make progress
comparing it to the original shipping kernel config. I am not an expert
with kernel configs, haven't really messed with it since FreeBSD 5 was
current... I will try compiling source on the cloud instance I am playing
with and see if I can come up with something useful to add to the wiki.

On Wednesday, August 22, 2012, Gordan Bobic wrote:

> On 08/22/2012 10:45 AM, Adrian Hardy wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 1:29 AM, Gordan Bobic <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>>     On 08/20/2012 03:48 PM, Adrian Hardy wrote:
>>
>>         A 32 core ARM v7 1U server which draws < 1A on max load?
>>         http://www.baserock.com/
>>         ....
>>
>>     Most interesting. I've just dropped them a message.
>>
>>     I've also similarly had a chat with Boston about their Viridis
>>     servers (Calxeda based) and we got RS running on those. The only
>>     downside is that the fully loaded machine is about £30K and the
>>     minimal configuration is over £6K. Awesome machine, but hard to
>>     stretch to for an unfunded volunteer project.
>>
>>
>> Glad to hear it's of interest. I'm still interested to know how a
>> regular person would make use of it without virtualisation. Either that,
>> or make use of cheap clustering like MySQL NDB / round robin CGI, etc. I
>> suppose for redsleeve, it could function as a relatively simple parallel
>> build farm with 8 RPMs being built at any given time. Please be sure to
>> post back with their reply :)
>>
>
> I've exchanged a couple of emails with them and they don't appear to be
> particularly interested in RedSleeve. The product also seems to be somewhat
> vaporware, much more so than the Boston Viridis. The relevant quote from
> their email is:
> "There is no simple pricing model due to the limited run"
> They also didn't seem to respond when asked if their system would be
> competitively priced against the Boston Viridis' minimal configuration (4
> nodes x 4 cores at about £6K), which leads me to believe it won't be
> significantly cheaper, if at all, especially considering the Viridis
> pricing per node improves as you add more CPU modules.
>
> On the subject of how you would use it, these are farm-in-a-box blade type
> machines, same as x86 blade systems. They are many separate computers. The
> only way you could glue them together into a single SMP-ish machine would
> be to use an SSI (Single System Image) kernel, e.g. Kerrighed (only
> supports x86-64, not even x86-32, let alone ARM or another architecture),
> Mosix (not free, no idea if it supports anything but x86). There could be
> other options - you might be interested to have a look at this:
>
> http://openssi.org/cgi-bin/**view?page=openssi.html<http://openssi.org/cgi-bin/view?page=openssi.html>
>
> Unfortuantely, the kernels supported by OpenSSI are quite ancient.
>
> The other thing to consider is that this sort of technology usually comes
> with substantial performance penalties, and is only suitable for _very_
> coarse grained tasks. I tried distributed kernel compiling on a 4 cores x 2
> nodes x86-64 Kerrighed cluster and the time it takes to compile most .c
> files is less than the time it takes to migrate the process to another
> node, so this is not a suitable application for SSI.
>
> When you use a setup like this the only efficient way get performance out
> of it is to use a load balancing solution such as LNLB to distribute the
> load of network requests coming in, or shard the data in the database, or
> for a rpm build farm using koji or something similar that would build
> different rpms on different nodes.
>
> Gordan
> ______________________________**_________________
> users mailing list
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>


-- 
Thanks,

Ian M Perkins
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