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

!!!!

[Unanonymous Coward]

:)

Re:Let me get this straight...

[fshalor]

1. We're NOT in a war against Islam.
2. If we think we're in a war against Islam, then we have lost.
3. We are in a war against Microsoft and almost all that she stands for.
4. This would be a major blow in the final battle of that war.
5. Any "linux" based application/hardware that takes even a miniscule share in any market is worth the time spent to develop it, as long as it's intentions are pure.
6. Without inventions like these (when can I get mine?) we regress into nothing.
7. (and last one.) The souls of the victims of every war and conflict in history would like you to get your information straight. And would like us to get on with our lives.

No one can tell anyone else who they don't know how to get on with our lives. I'm not telling you to get over it, am I?

And to struggle for that on-topic (1), think about the heat issue, folks. These cards have got to be smokkin'

-=fshalor

Impractical

[atrowe]

I don't see these things taking off for most uses because the PCI bus is limited to a measly 133 MB/S. Even newer 64 bit PCI slots found in some servers have insignifigant bandwidth to keep the data flowing fast enough to make full use of these things. I can see where they may come in handy for heavy number crunching applications such as SETI, but for web serving and DB applications, the throughput between the card and the host system is simply unacceptable.

Also, I would imagine that the RF interference generated by having several of these in one box would be quite signifigant. PCI slots are only an inch or so apart on most motherboards, and without any sort of RF shielding between multiple cards, I can't imagine they'd function properly. It's a good idea on paper, but in reality, I'd think a few 1U rackmount servers would do the job much better. And for $499 a piece, you could get a decent single processor rackmount server for around the same price.

Re:Impractical

[Sleuth]

> -atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have
> no toleranse for stupidity.
>

Cool. Now that you've taken the Mensa test you can spend some time with a dictionary.

lol.