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SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

venturebeat.com

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Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#41

Post by lsb »

wenbert wrote: post #31
astrodust wrote: post #6

I hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.

Hopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.

If you'd like really cheap web hosting, try http://nearlyfreespeech.net. Write something in PHP, and you can use a SQLite database for free (just put a high timeout on write locking) or a MySQL database for $0.01/day or something. They don't support FastCGI, so any other language would require starting up a new runtime for each web request, which is pretty much a non-starter if you can't afford $16/mo (which is the prepaid limit).

If you need money for a project to get kickstarted, try Kiva or Kickstarter.

On the plus site, if 5 of you can fit onto the EC2 small instance, it's only $6/mo, if you do a spot instance with a high maximum.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#43

Post by mlni »

lsc wrote: post #39
wenbert wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.

Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.

Why not just buy google ads for technical keywords and target only the desired countries?

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#44

Post by hga »

p3ll0n wrote: post #4

James Hamilton, VP at Amazon and author of the popular blog "Perspectives" has some interesting insights into and great things to say about the work SeaMicro and other new startups are doing to revolutionize the server industry. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleases...

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1429625 for HN item on this excellent posting of his with a few comments, e.g. I note he notes this system has no ECC. And that Intel is pretty unique in that limitation.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#45

Post by hga »

njharman wrote: post #10
stcredzero wrote: post #2

The way I read this, they are achieving savings by virtually mux-ing (or de-muxing depending on viewpoint) much of everything that's not the CPU. Is this optimized to make the support of virtual servers with relatively low throughput more efficient?

I read it to be they created a chip that runs code written to emulate/virtualize most of the other (non-cpu) logic on a motherboard. so instead of 10 "io" chips and 10 "memory" chips most of which are idle they have 15 virt chips which may act as either "io" or "memory" depending on demand. I guess (de)muxing is close to that? Multiplexing many "request" amongst fewer real(non-virutal) objects.

Well, they're only muxing IO; each Atom CPU has a chipset CPU and it's own DRAM (up to 2GB (the Atom has a hard 4GB limit), no ECC since Intel only offers that for official server chips).

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#46

Post by jonknee »

surlyadopter wrote: post #26

With that many processors crammed into such a small case isn't heat dissipation a problem? Or are the Atom chips used not as power hungry as a standard commercial cpu?

"Atom chips used not as power hungry as a standard commercial cpu" is quite literally the entire point of this startup/product and the article. You had to quit reading before the second sentence to miss this:

> The startup is announcing today it has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#47

Post by CountHackulus »

I do see a potential problem here. In the pictures, they show a bunch of Atom CPUs soldered directly to the board. That means dire things for service. Now, if a single CPU has a a flaw, you need to replace an entire board of CPUs.

Compare this to a standard blade setup, where you could just swap out CPUs, or even an IBM System Z where you could hotswap the CPU, and service doesn't look so great.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#48

Post by hga »

c00p3r wrote: post #29

There are no information about the chipset, memory specs and extension slots in particular. It could be a huge bottleneck between CPUs and RAM, because of concurrent access of so many CPUs to the memory while Atoms have a very small caches. It means that real-world applications, like a multi-threaded services (especially JVM-based, or simply MySQL) could not be used efficiently. I'm also very skeptical about hundreds…

Here's a lot more technical detail: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3768/seamicro-announces-sm1000...

Per CPU (8 per board):

  Atom Z530 (1.6GHz, Silverthorne)
  US15 chipset (Poulsbo)
  2GB DDR2
Per board:

  4 ASICs to virtualize IO
  2x PCIe x16 connectors
"Each hop takes 8 microseconds", so good enough for (most/all?) IO but not good enough for memory.

No ECC of course, it being a non-server Intel chip. Each single cored CPU has its own DIMM.

* * * * EDITED to clarify the layout per CPU and per board after c00p3r made it clear I wasn't being clear. * * * *

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#49

Post by noahc »

wenbert wrote: post #31
astrodust wrote: post #6

I hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.

Hopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.

ASO has $25/year web hosting that is solid.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#50

Post by gfodor »

CountHackulus wrote: post #47

I do see a potential problem here. In the pictures, they show a bunch of Atom CPUs soldered directly to the board. That means dire things for service. Now, if a single CPU has a a flaw, you need to replace an entire board of CPUs. Compare this to a standard blade setup, where you could just swap out CPUs, or even an IBM System Z where you could hotswap the CPU, and service doesn't look so great.

You're certainly jumping to a lot of conclusions here, perhaps the boards of CPUs are quite cheap?
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