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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

#101

Post by hga »

lsc wrote: post #70
arvinjoar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rethink that if I were you. What if you started to provide virtual private servers on one of these boxes instead of offering colocation? I think this innovation makes VPS solutions even more efficient than they are today.

hm. the price data would show it's not more efficient in terms of capital. $140K, right? before disk? for 1024GiB ram and 512 CPUs. with my current setup, I end up paying about $1900 for 32GiB ram and 8 (/much/ more powerful) CPUs before disk. So, I'd need 32 of those puppies, at a much more reasonable $60,800 - it would give me half as many CPUs, but, uh, from my experience a atom core is less than half a opteron co…

You can put up to 64 hard disks/SSDs in the front.

If your power consumption figures are right, it would take 46 years to make up the difference at 10 cents/kW h. As I recall, you'd divide that by half for the cost of cooling, and then you'd have to figure in the lower capital costs of requiring 1/2 the cooling.

Also possibly subtract some network hardware. The box provides "Up to 64 1 Gbps or 16 10 Gbps uplinks". And it may be more "server grade" than your setup, it integrates load balancing and server management; at the very least, the hotswap granularity is smaller.

That still sounds off, except for companies that are running out of machine room space (the type of premium you pay for a laptop).

How sure are you of your alternative's power consumption? I.e. have you hooked one up to a Kill-A-Watt meter? They claim 1/4 of the power of "today's best in class volume server".

I think we're obsessing too much on the "$139,000" figure, if you look at http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38 you'll see there are so many options (1 or 2 GB per CPU, Ethernet and storage cards, possibly/likely some cost for the optional hot swap disk physical infrastructure, etc.).

To make a good comparison you'd need to figure out and price a system including load balancing and network hardware, measure it for real and contact SeaMicro to find out the real price for a comparable system from them. Plus until they work through their backlog they won't be too eager to discount....

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#102

Post by hga »

WilliamLP wrote: post #77
limist wrote: post #36

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...

I think I can afford to wait until people start proving undeniably (through out-competing rivals) that Scala and Clojure have any pragmatic benefit in real multicore programming tasks. Anything that mentions Fibonacci numbers doesn't count, nor do easily parallelizable problems commonly handled in C/C++ (ray tracing, media encoding, web servers, etc.) It needs to be something not trivially broken up into independent…

Don't forget that part of the claims are not that the resultant programs are more computing resource intensive but that they are more easily developed and debugged. Which is pretty important in this arena.

And while I don't know about Scala, Clojure is a little too young to obsess on preformance, each point release (1.0, 1.1, etc.) is delivering significant improvements.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#103

Post by hga »

sh1mmer wrote: post #97

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…

I suspect a lot if not most of their customers will be buying more than one, so that mitigates the PSU problem.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#104

Post by ippisl »

hga wrote: post #66
ippisl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some see the move to many-core ATOM servers , as a move to put financial pressure on intel(since ATOMs are cheap). And this move helps the future of ARM based servers , since ARM is more similar to ATOM than to XEON.

There's going to be limits to the amount of pressure as long as Intel doesn't offer ECC for any Atom variety microarchitecture. One of the articles I read said that they thought about using an AMD chip but it wasn't going to ship soon enough. I can see them hearing from their customers (would be and actual) that they'd buy more if they offered ECC and SeaMicro offering an AMD based box in the future. I wonder how Ato…

i think that the chip also suits the ARM architecture without changes.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#105

Post by mattmcknight »

Tamerlin wrote: post #33
mattmcknight wrote: post #12

It would have been better to see a comparison with SGI (ex-Rackable) CloudRack systems, which have a bit of an inbetween approach, using Xeons, but at least nominally seem to pack in more cores in the same enclosure size. One of their power tricks, in addition to pulling back DC converters further from the computers, is to allow things to run hot, resulting in savings on cooling costs.

The SGI machines are geared pretty heavily toward supercomputing applications. As such they're tailored for applications that need to share data between processes efficiently, and that also need to do a lot of computing. The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors. W…

I was thinking of the Rackable stuff, not the supercomputing stuff. They actually acquired SGI, but took the SGI name. http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#106

Post by wmf »

sh1mmer wrote: post #97

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…

a) Web 2.0 sites.

b) It has four redundant power supplies, as do all systems of this size.

c) It's a Beowulf cluster.

d) See the FAWN, Amdahl blade, Gordon, and CEMS papers.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#107

Post by lsc »

hga wrote: post #101
lsc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hm. the price data would show it's not more efficient in terms of capital. $140K, right? before disk? for 1024GiB ram and 512 CPUs. with my current setup, I end up paying about $1900 for 32GiB ram and 8 (/much/ more powerful) CPUs before disk. So, I'd need 32 of those puppies, at a much more reasonable $60,800 - it would give me half as many CPUs, but, uh, from my experience a atom core is less than half a opteron co…

You can put up to 64 hard disks/SSDs in the front. If your power consumption figures are right, it would take 46 years to make up the difference at 10 cents/kW h. As I recall, you'd divide that by half for the cost of cooling, and then you'd have to figure in the lower capital costs of requiring 1/2 the cooling. Also possibly subtract some network hardware. The box provides "Up to 64 1 Gbps or 16 10 Gbps uplinks". An…

I can slot 4 disks in the front of my pizza boxes, too... I was just doing the calculation without disk because the blade was priced out without disk.

my power figures are approximate, but real-world; This is what it says when you log in to the APC.

also, unless you own the data centre, cooling costs are priced into power. 2x20a 120v circuts are the most I can get in one rack (they don't want too much power density, right?) that's 30a 120v usable, or 3600 watts, and it costs me about a grand a month. Being as you can easily slot more than 30 pizza boxes in a 44u rack, density doesn't matter, because even my lowest density solution can give me more power density than the co-lo cooling system can handle, so when I'm pricing things out, I simply count each watt as costing me around $0.28 per month. Which includes rackspace, but as I said, in the data centres available to me, the factor limiting density is the cooling system, not my equipment.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#108

Post by lsc »

wenbert wrote: post #98
lsc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

hah. I'm trolling for customers, not employees. I serve the price sensitive, you see, but I do it in part by providing less support service, so I need people who know what they are doing as customers.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#109

Post by DEinspanjer »

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...)

Sorry I was rather vague there. Ultimately needed lots of parallelism. Smallest unit of parallelism in my ETL tool is threads. If you need more threads than one core or CPU can deliver, then you cluster out to multiple machines, and they communicate via sockets as needed.

Re: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

#110

Post by Tamerlin »

mattmcknight wrote: post #105
Tamerlin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SGI machines are geared pretty heavily toward supercomputing applications. As such they're tailored for applications that need to share data between processes efficiently, and that also need to do a lot of computing. The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors. W…

I was thinking of the Rackable stuff, not the supercomputing stuff. They actually acquired SGI, but took the SGI name. http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009...

I'd forgotten that Rackable did they acquiring in that one. Oops :)
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