Is this another line of non-intel machines that the manufacturer will bury in a hidden portion of their website and deny that even exists in public?
HP's new ARM-based Servers
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#22How odd that HP calls these servers Project Moonshot. A moonshot used to be slang for something with a low probability of success.
It's also a federated authentication project for the non-web: http://project-moonshot.org/
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#23I think this is a highly significant move by ARM. It's amazing when you speak to datacentre people and they tell you how much of your server charges go on electricity and cooling. My recent example was £200 extra/year for an additional Opteron 6128 and £400 extra/year for the increased power usage from that processor!
There is an obvious gap in the market for low power, low heat generating, high memory throughput server processors. I'd just like to see a reference Linux distro which supports 16 ARM cores as well as a reference server card...
The specs:
http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycore/ecx1000/techspecs
only refer to 32-bit memory addressing as well (ie. Interesting times!
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#24How odd that HP calls these servers Project Moonshot. A moonshot used to be slang for something with a low probability of success.
It's against HP's immune system to sell machines without Windows. They already try hard not to sell their HP-UX and NonStop boxes, but clients insist on relying on them.
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#25I wonder if the Redstone part of the name came from a secret Minecraft fan at HP's headquarters.
I hope it succeeds, just to give Intel a run for their money. I really think that ARM is the future of computing (including the desktop).
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#26Project Moonshot? What's wrong, "Project Vaporware" was taken?
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#27From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_... :
The sales pitch for the Redstone systems, says Santeler, is that a half rack of Redstone machines and their external switches implementing 1,600 server nodes has 41 cables, burns 9.9 kilowatts, and costs $1.2m.
A more traditional x86-based cluster doing the same amount of work would only require 400 two-socket Xeon servers, but it would take up 10 racks of space, have 1,600 cables, burn 91 kilowatts, and cost $3.3m.
Hmm, let's see. It's about 7-8 grands per Xeon server, something like HP Proliant DL360R07 (2 x 6-core Xeons at 2.66GHz). It's 3 times as many cores as Redstone, clocked at 2.66 times greater frequency each, and doing more instructions per clock tick, too. And that's without hyperthreading.
Am I missing something big, or is Redstone solution neither cost-effective nor energy-effective?
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#28From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_... : The sales pitch for the Redstone systems, says Santeler, is that a half rack of Redstone machines and their external switches implementing 1,600 server nodes has 41 cables, burns 9.9 kilowatts, and costs $1.2m. A more traditional x86-based cluster doing the same amount of work would only require 400 two-socket Xeon servers, but it would take up 10…
You assume the application is compute limited and that the extra performance on the Xeon translates into extra performance on a given application. That's probably not a good assumption for this kind of workload.
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#29From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_... : The sales pitch for the Redstone systems, says Santeler, is that a half rack of Redstone machines and their external switches implementing 1,600 server nodes has 41 cables, burns 9.9 kilowatts, and costs $1.2m. A more traditional x86-based cluster doing the same amount of work would only require 400 two-socket Xeon servers, but it would take up 10…
You assume the application is compute limited and that the extra performance on the Xeon translates into extra performance on a given application. That's probably not a good assumption for this kind of workload.
Why, for embarrassingly parallel workloads (like the ones they mention) it's a totally reasonable assumption. And for something not so parallel the gazillion of ARM nodes is all but useless.
Re: HP's new ARM-based Servers
#30I think this is a highly significant move by ARM. It's amazing when you speak to datacentre people and they tell you how much of your server charges go on electricity and cooling. My recent example was £200 extra/year for an additional Opteron 6128 and £400 extra/year for the increased power usage from that processor! There is an obvious gap in the market for low power, low heat generating, high memory throughput ser…
No virtualization ability. No addressibility of more than 4G is a killer for some apps. CPU horsepower density isn't quite as high as they say: at 72 quad-core A9's per rack unit vs. 6.4 Xeons in a comparable 10U blade server. A Nehalem clocks about 3x faster and runs about 1.5-2x faster per clock than the A9 for "random server logic" workloads, so this appears to be higher by only a little bit.
Power consumption isn't clear. I see no peak load wattage numbers, which worries me for a product marketed expressly as a low-power option.
One advantage this architecture does have is density of memory bandwidth. They have 72 DDR3 channels per rack unit vs. 25.6 for a blade server filled with 4-channel Westmere EXs (the Intel boards will stack the DIMMs up on the same channel). So you might want to look seriously at it as a hosting platform for a very parallel in-memory data store.