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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#911

Post by goldinfra »

DrScientist wrote: post #875
goldinfra wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coupling requires more integration work, including writing and testing custom firmware. Oxide will be a tiny market player for a long time, even if things go very well. Are AMD and Broadcom really going to spend as much time helping Oxide as they do helping Dell? Of course not, Oxide's order volume will be a rounding error. I'm sure they'll improve their processes over time but the lag will probably always be a non-z…

> it would be surprising if they don't run into some nasty issue that leaves their customers 6+ months behind on servers or switches at some point. I just think your premise is wrong - most customers don't care about not having the absolute latest and greatest. Indeed they will often avoid them because 1. They are new so more likely to have as yet undiscovered issues ( hardware or drivers ). 2. If you buy top end, th…

Most customers care about having the best of the available options. Rarely would any company deliberately choose to be behind where their competitors can be.

1. The way to run into undiscovered issues is to choose a completely custom firmware/hardware/software stack that almost no one else in the world is running.

2. Not sure where you're getting this from. There is almost always a price:performance calculation that results in current generation smashing the previous generation with server and switch hardware. Often this means not buying the flagship chips but still the current generation.

And a major reason to get off old generations of hardware is that they become unavailable relatively quickly. It's always easier to buy current generation hardware than previous generation hardware, especially a couple years into the current generation. This has nothing to do with chasing the latest hardware.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#912

Post by latchkey »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #866
latchkey wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Brian, thanks for the response. Metaphorical fans, but also fans, and everything else. It was an example from the blog post. I looked at that super innovative and cool backplane. Sure, warranty covers it for the first N years, but then what? What happens when things turn into a Tesla situation and you get horror stories of delays and poor results? I think 'commodity' is generalized at this point. Given the choice…

You are ignoring the software stack, which is where a huge portion of the value-add is found.

I'm not ignoring the software stack, I just don't see any value in the additional vendor lock in on it. I'd rather use open source stuff developed by a large community of people and not a single small vendor tied to a very specific and limited hardware stack.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#913

Post by freedomben »

jjav wrote: post #648
yencabulator wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a horrible example, with Apple when you have a problem, you often end up with an unfixable issue that Apple won't even acknowledge. You definitely don't want to taint Oxide's reputation with that association. As for why I think Helios will become customer facing: Oxide is a small startup. They have limited resources. Their computers expensive enough to be very much business critical. You'll get some support…

> Apple is a horrible example, Apple is a great example of the benefits of an integrated system where the hardware and software are designed together. There are tons of benefits to that. What makes Apple evil (IMO, many people disagree) is how everything is secret and proprietary and welded shut. But that doesn't take away from the benefits of an integrated hardware/software ecosystem. Oxide is open source so it does…

In practice I don't think it's as good as in theory. I had Apple Macbook Pro with Apple Monitor, and 50% of the time when unplugging the monitor the laptop screen would stay off. Plugging back in to the monitor wouldn't work at that point so all I could do was hold the power button to force it off and reboot. That's with Apple controlling the entire stack - software, hardware, etc.

I think the real benefit is being able to move/deprecate/expand at will. For example, want an app that would require special hardware? You can just add it. Want to drop support for old drivers? Just stop selling them and then drop (deprecate) the software support in the next release.

I fully agree about the evilness, and it baffles me how few people do!

Re: The Cloud Computer

#915

Post by ChuckMcM »

mgh95 wrote: post #839
ChuckMcM wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a huge deal. I'm biased though because my own takes on how things should evolve were very similar. I was however completely unsuccessful in getting those ideas into production! And that, that is a huge deal. Through out my career it has been interesting to meet people with great ideas and then they are unable to get them into production, and when the idea does come into production everyone feels like "Wow, this i…

Can you clarify a bit on what you mean by "chunk" guy? Are you alluding to the ability to distribute work by an isolation mechanism such as cgroups vs machine a-la borg/google?

More on infrastructure composition software is an abstraction above that.

Is the unit of composition a rack (chunk), a server (smaller chunk), or a blade (smallest chunk)? In what I think of as classic systems architecture you've got a 'store' (storage), 'state' (memory), 'threads' (computation), and 'interconnect' (fabrics). In the 90's a lot of folks focused on fabrics (Cray, Connection Machine, Sun, etc) somewhat on threads (compute blades), and state came along for the ride. How these systems were composed was always a big thing, then along came the first Beowulf clusters that used off the shelf motherboards (a "chunk" of threads/state/store) with a generic fabric (Ethernet). Originally NASA showed that you could do some highly parallel processing on these sorts of systems and Larry and Sergei at Stanford applied it to the process of internet search.

Collectively you have a 'system resource' and with software you can make it look like anything you want. When you do compute with it, its performance becomes a function of its systems balance and the demands of the workload. Its all computer sciencey and yes there is a calculus to it. This isn't something that most people dive into (or are even interested in[1]) but it was one of the things that captured my imagination early on as an engineer. I was consumed with questions like what was the difference between a microprocessor, a mini-computer, a workstation, and a mainframe? Why do they each exist? What does one do that they other can't? Things like that.

[1] At Google I worked in what they called 'Platforms' early on and clearly most of the company didn't really care about the ins and outs of the systems bigtable/gfs/spanner/etc ran on, they just wanted APIs to call. But they also didn't care about utilization or costs. By the time I left some folks had just figured out (and one guy was building his career on) the fact that utilization directly affected operational costs. They still hadn't started thinking about non-uniform rack configurations for different workloads.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#916

Post by bobthecowboy »

glandium wrote: post #799
bobthecowboy wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I work at SoftIron. We have several HyperCloud systems in production right now. SI has been shipping purpose-built storage systems for years as the root-comment suggests, but HyperCloud (which is closer to Oxide's product) has been in production systems in defense, banking, internationally for well over a year now.

It looks like SoftIron is not shipping a rack in a single box, though.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean.

I believe our smallest configuration is 5 servers and a few switches.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#917

Post by DrScientist »

goldinfra wrote: post #911
DrScientist wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would be surprising if they don't run into some nasty issue that leaves their customers 6+ months behind on servers or switches at some point. I just think your premise is wrong - most customers don't care about not having the absolute latest and greatest. Indeed they will often avoid them because 1. They are new so more likely to have as yet undiscovered issues ( hardware or drivers ). 2. If you buy top end, th…

Most customers care about having the best of the available options. Rarely would any company deliberately choose to be behind where their competitors can be. 1. The way to run into undiscovered issues is to choose a completely custom firmware/hardware/software stack that almost no one else in the world is running. 2. Not sure where you're getting this from. There is almost always a price:performance calculation that…

> And a major reason to get off old generations of hardware is that they become unavailable relatively quickly.

That's not in the customers interests per se- in fact it's a pain. Having control of their own stuff could mean they could offer a much longer effective operational life.

> The way to run into undiscovered issues is to choose a completely custom firmware/hardware/software stack that almost no one else in the world is running.

What breaks stuff is change - sure when they are starting up it's higher risk - but again if they can manage the lifecycle better, not have change for changes sake, then they could be much more reliable.

> Not sure where you're getting this from.

I was talking about not taking the flagship stuff - which is typically a few months ahead of the best price/performance stuff.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#918

Post by FullyFunctional »

mfer wrote: post #699
leetrout wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iPhones do have the pedigree Not in 2007-2008 which is equivalent to Oxide today.

iPhones became popular through the bring your own device movement. You aren’t going to see that with racks in a data center

It think it was the other way around. The success of the iPhone (and Android) was a large factor behind the BYD movement.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#919

Post by SoftTalker »

goldinfra wrote: post #823
SoftTalker wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I'm still using a cluster of Haswell processors to run VMs for appropriate workloads and it's all fine.

If you're not rapidly scaling it probably doesn't matter. But if you're still buying (and maybe even using) Haswell CPUs in 2023, you may be missing out in a big way. A moderately large Haswell cluster is equivalent in power to a moderately powerful modern server.

No not buying new, just using what was bought years ago. It still works, it does the job. Is it the best performance per watt, clearly no but the budget for electricity and the budget for new capital expenses are two different things.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#920

Post by seabrookmx »

goldinfra wrote: post #823
SoftTalker wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I'm still using a cluster of Haswell processors to run VMs for appropriate workloads and it's all fine.

If you're not rapidly scaling it probably doesn't matter. But if you're still buying (and maybe even using) Haswell CPUs in 2023, you may be missing out in a big way. A moderately large Haswell cluster is equivalent in power to a moderately powerful modern server.

If you go on Google cloud and select an E2 instance type (atleast in `us-central1` where my company runs most of it's infra) you'll usually get Broadwell chips.
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