Fitting A Linux Box On A PCI Card

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Running on Newsforge/Linux.com is a hardware review where Slashdot's Krow took a couple of OmniCluster's Slotservers and and built a cluster configuation inside of a singe host computer (and even had DB2 running on one of the card's inside of the host). Could something like this be the future of computing where for additional processing power you just kept adding additional computers inside of a host?"

Comments

G4 processor cards

[Peter Dyck]

I've been wondering how expensive/difficult it would be to build a multiprocessor computer for computational physics applications based on G4 PowerPC cards.

I'd just love the idea of having a host PC (or a Beowulf cluster of them ;-) with all the PCI slots filled with G4 7400 boards crushing numbers...

PCI card computers

[hattig]

You have to remember from a certain aspect, you can add a PCI card to a motherboard which made the motherboard the PCI slave.

PCI = PCI = PCI = CPU = PCI = PCI
I I I I
IDE CPU CPU CPU
I I I
USB PCIs PCIs
I I
IDE ..
I
USB

I have left out memory controllers, northbridge, etc, and modern fancy chip interconnects because they are just fluff (no, not fluffers, that is another industry). In the above diagram, what is the host CPU? Is there actually such a thing as a host? The PCI bus is arguably the center of a modern PC, with CPUs and controllers hanging off of it.

Modern motherboards are just a restriction on what you can do in reality. Reality is a PCI backplane on a case, maybe with a couple of PCI-PCI bridges. You can then add anything into any PCI card that you want - normal PCI cards, or CPUs (NB, Memory, CPU, etc).

That is why you can configure these cards to use the 'host' IDE drive. It is just a device on every 'computer' within the case...

I can't post a diagram though, because I must use "fewer junk characters". Bloody lameness filter - affects the real users, the people it is meant to trap just work around it. Would you call this a "lame post"?

Re:Ob Beowulf comment

[Khalid]

There has been a project a while ago, which aim was to implement a beowulf of separate StrongArm cards to be plugged in a box, they have even managed to build some prototypes.

http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/sa-beowulf/

Alas I think the project seems to be dead for some time now.

Re:Linux on PCI cards is the way forward.

[Ron Harwood]

Actually, in my LUG we've given the newbies an eval copy of VMware, and a pre-installed linux image... let's them play for a month before they have to think about installing.

Re:Impractical

[morcheeba]

RF Interference:
I don't think there will be a problem with interference. Check out these computers. They use a similar system, but instead of being on a pidly motherboard, they use the ubiquitous VME format. They really pack in the processors -- 4 G4 PPC's per daughter card, and 4 daughter cards per single 9U VME card, and then 16 9U cards per chassis, and then three chassis. (4*4*16*3=48 TFLOPS) The pitch spacing on PCI is comprable to that on VME.

Also, I wondered about the connector on the tops of these boards. It looks like another PCI card edge. I wonder if this is a duplicate of the host PCI interface (for debug purposes), if it's a new "slot" to connect to the server's internal bus, or if it's a way to connect server cards bypassing the main PCI bus (for better performance).

Re:CPU Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a x86 CPU, a NS Geode which I believe is based on a 486. I got all excited until I realised this thing has practically no use as it does n't have enough grunt. Even if you put 6 cards into one machine and each card had 266MHz thats still only 1596MHz and remember the IPC of a 486 is nowhere near the IPC of an Athlon/P3 or any other modern processor.

SUN has a similar product..

[Phizzy]

I am actually typing this comment on a Sun Microsystems SUNPCI card.. It's a celeron, I beleive a 466mhz or so, w/ 128m of ram. It has onboard video if you want to use an external monitor or can use the sun's native card if you want to run it windowed, ditto w/ ethernet. I've been using the card for about 3 months now, and other than some instability w/ SunOS 2.6 (which dissapeared in 2.8), I haven't had problems with it.. you can copy/paste between the Sun window and the 'PC' window, which is very helpful.. and though we are running WIN2000 on it (ok.. so shoot me) I don't see any reason why you couldn't run linux on it if you really wanted too.. All-in-all, the card is pretty badass..

//Phizzy

Re:Imagine a new kind of bus

[MikeFM]

I think the basic form to use is some simplified base system designed to be upgraded to the extreme. No built-in crap on the motherboard to speak of.. just lots of PCI slots. If they could share harddrive and RAM and provide a keyboard/mouse/monitor switching method similar to KVM switches but all in one box it'd be great. So rather than replacing older computers we could just add to them. Maybe perfect something like MOSIX and drop the whole stupid SMP idea. I've always imagined computers would someday be like legos where you could buy a CPU lego, a RAM lego, a harddrive lego, etc and just plug them together in any order to add to a hot system. No reboot and no case to open. If one burned out just toss it and put a new one in.