Slashdot Mirror

Egenera has been doing the same thing for almost 8 years. They did it first on their hardware and now on Dell Blades. Ironically several people from the Cisco side working on this came from Egenera and the messaging is almost identical.

Egenera Website

There's some interest in doing this same sort of thing at my current employer. Of course, we're a telecom and we'd be providing not just the Utility Computing service but the bandwidth to the customer as well...

I can see this as working *very* well, for companies that can deliver both with reasonable cost.

BTW - I want a datacenter full of these so bad I can taste it!

[...] cryptography [...] cryptography [...] cryptography

See, there's your problem. Now I understand why you don't get it. Not everything you use a hash for is cryptography, or even security related. If you don't understand that, of course you won't understand what I'm saying. You need to understand this to see why you're so very, very wrong.

300% increase in network utilization? Umm, no. Not unless all you're sending is a constant stream of hashes.

I said 300% increase in overhead, not a 300% increase in utilization, however if you are familliar with the protocols I used as an example, you'd know that in the best case scenario, hashes are all you'd send over the network. Remember, hashes are used for a lot more than security.

Once again, these datacenters are running Windows on all their machines of course, otherwise this would have absolutely no point in this discussion...

Ever hear of a company called Egenera? They make very high density compute farms that run windows. They're not the only ones. So, yes. It is done. But you're the one who's pulling this windows requirement out of your ass.

Not in cryptography. A faster hash that has lots of collisions and can easily be 'fooled' is almost NEVER useful.

Yes I'm repeating myself, but it'll do you good. Many, if not most, of the uses of hash functions have nothing to do with security or cryptography.

The Control blades run Linux. The Processor blades run Linux or Windows.

e-genera has some neat dynamically reconfigurable computers that amount to a single-rack, virtualized server farm that can run a customized version of SMPed Linux or Win2k/XP.

Vern Brownell was CTO at GS. He's CEO, not CTO, at Egenera.