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SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

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Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#91

Post by koenigdavidmj »

blhack wrote: post #89
blhack wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine I would love to watch that thing boot, haha. SO many penguins!

I apologize for the self-reply, but am I wrong here? I use mostly OpenBSD and linux only lives on servers that I don't physically see booting. I remember when I first starting using Linux, there would be one penguin for each processor core. Booting it up for the first time on a dual xeon machine and seeing 8 of them, was kindof funny in a nerdy way. Would this be different? If there are 512 cores...would it show a pe…

Most likely it would be an 80x25 text console, no framebuffer in sight. Maybe even a serial console.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#92

Post by wmf »

blhack wrote: post #89
blhack wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine I would love to watch that thing boot, haha. SO many penguins!

I apologize for the self-reply, but am I wrong here? I use mostly OpenBSD and linux only lives on servers that I don't physically see booting. I remember when I first starting using Linux, there would be one penguin for each processor core. Booting it up for the first time on a dual xeon machine and seeing 8 of them, was kindof funny in a nerdy way. Would this be different? If there are 512 cores...would it show a pe…

You're right; IIRC some SGIs show a whole screenful of penguins. But you're kind of derailing the conversation.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#93

Post by 10ren »

I would think that ARM chips would use less power than Atom; but compatibility with existing software is a big selling point (as always). But this would provide a pressure towards ARM servers, and therefore ARM-compatible software.

OTOH, I get the impression that the bulk of the power savings are not from the CPU at all, but from virtualizing the other components. Therefore, the pressure towards ARM is much less.

And I suppose Intel wouldn't be supportive unless there was a compelling long-term reason to choose Atom.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#94

Post by InclinedPlane »

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.

Indeed. It's a rung on the ladder to times when what fills a rack or a server room today will fit into a 1U tomorrow. There will come a time in the not too distant future when the ability to host a site in which quite literally a majority of the world's population accesses multiple times per day is simply a matter of setting up a relatively run-of-the-mill inexpensive VPS. The implications such technology will have on business, society, culture, etc. are left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#95

Post by ableal »

bnoordhuis wrote: post #74
lsc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC is a huge thing in that case. The thing about being a VPS provider is that if your hardware chokes, your customers notice, and they get pissed. Sure, if you are running some kind of web farm you set it up so that things keep running without interruption if you lose a server. But if you provide VPS hosting and you lose a server? People notice, and they will be pissed. If you are a VPS provider and you loose custom…

I've seen ECC mentioned a few times in this thread but how relevant is it really? At my old job we used both regular COTS hardware from Dell and HP and high-performance gear from SUN, often at four times the price. The latter had ECC memory and, if memory serves, shielded CPUs but I never noticed much difference in stability or performance when compared to regular hardware. If someone has some numbers on this, I'd lo…

James Hamilton (the Amazon VP linked to in another comment) also mentions lack of ECC in his appreciation of SeaMicro; he links to his own take last year, referring to studies with numbers: "You Really do Need ECC Memory in Servers" http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedE...

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#97

Post by sh1mmer »

Anyone care to suggest some ideas on a few things:

a) who would likely buy these (corporates, SMEs, startups)?

b) it seems that they have increased the risk of single point of failure (e.g. 1 PSU taking down 128 nodes) what's the mitigation strategy?

c) what would an architecture on a box like this look like? Should I just be thinking of it as a cheap set of VPS nodes?

d) People keep mentioning the kind of processing these chips are good for and not so good for. Can someone be explicit about good real world uses and bad ones?

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#98

Post by wenbert »

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.

Try http://www.philweavers.net - I am not sure how it is now, but I have had a bunch of clients from their old site.

I think most people there are from Luzon - the biggest island in the Philippines - has the biggest city - so it is probably more expensive there than to get someone from Cebu. http://www.mynimo.com/ is local to Cebu. Or you could try JobsDB.com OR Jobstreet.com (almost all the big companies in my place advertise in JobsDB.com and Jobstreet.com)

What sort of skills are you looking for? I know some people who can run Linux boxes.

Edit: Just contact me through my email in my profile since I am a bit busy at the moment to check HN regularly.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#99

Post by wenbert »

lsb wrote: post #41
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.

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…

Thanks. NFSN looks really awesome - but the pricing is a bit too complicated. Right now, I am with Webhostingbuzz and I get a warning for using too much CPU from time to time.

Kiva / Kickstarter is very interesting. I wished I have heard of these sites right before my "busy season".

Right now, I am planning to save up so that I can get a Linode for one year.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#100

Post by hga »

runT1ME wrote: post #80
DEinspanjer wrote: post #58

I worked with one of these prototype boxes. I was using it for something a bit outside their common use case: clustered ETL processing of log data. I was quite happy with the performance. In the workloads I had that needed lots of threads, I was able to use the box to spin up a lot of nodes and crunch through several hundred GB of log data very quickly. The machines were easy to work with since they felt like normal…

I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine, or is it a 'cluster' in the sense that each node has a single processor? (You used both threads and inter-process, but also implied multiple nodes...)

It's a cluster, each node is a single core processor with a chipset chip, DIMM and 1/2 of an ASCI providing virtualized I/O (e.g. each core sees 4 virtual SATA drives) and an connection to a supercomputer style interconnect. Memory is not shared, each core is running it's own OS image.
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