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

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.