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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?"
Imagine...
It would be cool to have completely separate processors in a box, so that as long as there is power, each card can run on its own. Then you could network them together into a beowulf cluster, and then make clusters of clusters
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I've seen these around for ages, variety of manufacturers, but usually they're priced significantly higher than just buying several cheap PC's, granted you have a fast bus between cards/PC's, unless you have a redundant powersupply, one failure brings your whole cluster down, whereas networked mobos should be tolerant of one system failing. As for future, eh, they've been around long enough, but I expect the use has been rather specialized.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does anyone here remember a while back when that "fake" company tried to sell us SETI @ Home PCI cards? I was about to place my order, until the word came to me that they were a fraud. Kind of a funny joke at the time, though. At any rate, here is the old /. story on it:
8 22 6&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/23/215
It would have been GREAT to have an improvement in CPU speed on a PCI card, as I always have at least two free in every system I own. What I wonder, though, is what instructional speed would the PCI card "CPUs" give us?
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
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.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Here are the Geode specs... "Speeds offered up to 266 MHz"
BlackNova Traders
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 = 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"?
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.
BlackNova Traders
Follow me here:
A computer used to take up a room.
Then, computers were large cabinets in a computer room.
Now, they are boxes in a computer cabinet in a computer room.
So we can extrapolate the next step for computers is to be cardss in computer box in a computer cabinet in a computer room.
It's a natural (obvious) progression really.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
266mhz max. Their target audience is the firewall/network application.
:) a geek's dream.
Too bad a Dual Athlon-based solution (on a full length PCI card) would suck too much juice... at least from the current PCI specs... AMD needs to make a move like intel did with their Low wattage PIII, I'd love to see a 12 processor (5 pci slots plus host) renderfarm in a single box for a decent price. Not only it would be space saving, but imagine that in a plexi-glass case
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Imagine if all the devices in your computer were attached to each other with 100 GB optical cable.
Essentially there would be a switch that allowed about 32 devices to be attached.
The devices could be storage devices, processors, audio/video devices, or communication devices.
Storage devices would be things like memory, hard drives, cdroms and the like.
This bus would allow multiple processors to access the same device at the same time and would allow devices to communicate directly to each other, like allowing a program to be loaded directly from a hard drive into memory, or from a video capture device directly onto a hard drive.
No motherboard, just slots that held different form factor devices with power and optical wires attached.
A networking device would allow the internal protocol to be wrapped in IP and allow the interntal network to be bridged onto ethernet. This would allow the busses on seperate computers to work like a single computer. The processors on all the machines could easily network together, memory could be shared seamlessly, harddrive storage would be shared and kept backedup in real time. Any device in any machine could communicate directly with any other device in any other machine. Security allowing.
Want 20 processors in your machine? Install them.
Want 6 memory devices with 1GB each? Add them.
Want 100 desktop devices with only a network device, display device and input/output device that use the processor and storage out of an application server? No problem.
Want a box that seemlessly runs 20 different OSes each in a virtual machine that are ran across 10 boxes in a redundant failover system? No problem, it's all done in hardware.
Want the hard drives in all the desktop machines to act like one giant raid 5 to store all the companies data on? No problem. (1000 machines with 10 GB each is 10 TB of storage)
This is the future of computing.
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
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
I haven't been paying attention to the market... I guess things like this aren't all that rare. Apparently there's a G4 PPC computer-on-a-card as well.
But anyway, it reminds me a quite a bit of what Avid/Digidesign do for their high-end systems.
You see people who've got 6 slot PCI systems and 4 of those slots are filled with extra computing cards (sometimes more... some people get expansion chasis'). You can rely on your computers processor if you're not doing to many complex effects on a track of audio, but at some point (not too hard to reach... throw in a tube amp emulator and a reverb) you run out of CPU. So they have PCI cards which have a couple of DSP chips (Motorola 56xxx series, I think) on them, and the more of these you add, the more audio processing you can do simultaneously.
At some point, perhaps people will think: hey, why add a specialized card? Why not just more general purpose computing power?
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Right. And the cool part (which makes them a bit different then the typical solution) is the loopback ethernet on them.
You can't grep a dead tree.
I'd like to see a bus that was little more than a switch, with a minimum of logic for management.
For cards, it'd be great if each card had its own CPU and RAM. Ideally the cards would have a few universal connectors, each of which could accomodate an I/O module which would contain just the discrete electronics necessary to drive a specific device or medium (eg, video, audio, disk, network).
Bus-Switch modules would be interconnectable to accomodate more cards, and would have switch-like manegement features for segmentation, isolation and failover type features.
The CPU cards themselves ought to be less complicated than motherboards since there's no bus logic, just interconnect logic to the Switch-Bus and the I/O modules, and RAM.
Since each board has its own RAM and CPU it ought improve system performance because the O/S could offload much more processing to CPU boards dedicated to specific tasks. Instead of the kernal bothering with lower-level filesystem tasks and driving the hardware, a "driver" for filesystem and devices could be loaded on a CPU board dedicated to I/O.
The same could be true of user interfaces -- run the the UI on the board dedicated to video, audio and USB. The kernal could run applications or other jobs on the "processing" CPU board(s).
Networking? Offload the entire IP stack to the networking CPU board.
I looked at this and said... wait a minute, hasn't this already been sorta done? Despite not being a full featured box, Firecard is a PCI-card running Linux... for the purposes of supporting a firewall (as you could have guessed from the name if you'd not read the story -- Nov 14 2001... but it's cool that they've taken it to the next level.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
These cards have TWO NICs, one that talks across the PCI bus and one physical RJ45 10/100...
I'm only go to say this once, but I could copy/paste the same response to 20 or 30 posts on here...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Stuff like this started in the PC world, IIRC, with 386s on 16-bit ISA cards.
Nobody cared then.
Why would anyone care now?
Please explain your point using no more than 100 words.
-
Kid-proof tablet..
I think you can pick them up pretty cheap nowadays if you like that sort of thing. I don't imagine much mileage from trying to install a.n.other unless you feel like writing the relevant drivers to get everything to talk to each other.
Johnny
But is just adding boxes not cheaper, more flexible, and less prone to catastrophic failure?
By my reckoning, half-width 1U rackmount PCs stack more densely than mid-tower cases each with a half-dozen cards in it. Overall reliability increases, as well: you don't need to rely on a single motherboard and power supply to keep things going.
Putting a bunch of rackmount PCs into a single (portable, or not) box is also a very trivial exercise.
Is realestate at the desk really at such a premium that anyone need care about these things?
Kid-proof tablet..
this is exactly what many good video cards do, but in a specialized manner. same with high end sound etc. the idea of putting powerful cpu's on cards is probably as ancient as cards themselves.
as has been noted before, this would really be useful if the pci bus was extended (faster/wider). of course, making it faster/wider gives you what sgi has been doing for a while too (also mentioned above).
perhaps the most dissapointing thing is that all that power goes to waste on users playing solitare, running windows, aol, and quake, not on something that will actually need the power to perform the tasks. well, maybe quake isnt so bad...
Can this be the, uh, future?
No, not if it's existed for decades. It's what's referred to as a "mainframe". You know. An expandable number of processor boards running under an operating system that can treat them as any number of single-processor or multiprocessor machines, with the ability to reassign processes between CPUs.
The Unix world has had them for a long time, too. Modern examples include Sun's higher-end servers, which support hot-swappable and hot-pluggable processors and memory.
Doing it with x86 processors and standard x86 OSes like x86 Unixes and Windows is less common but I believe Compaq and maybe Unisys can sell you machines that can do it, too, with one or several instances of the OS running at once.
This hatdware approach is not quite the same as VMWare's server products, which do it via software and don't limit you to one OS per processor or block of processors. It in turn mimics other decades-old mainframe operating environments in approach.
IBM AS/400's have offered integrated Netfinity adapters for years. These are PCI cards with processors, memory, and console/network connections which share power and storage on the AS/400. You can fit up to 16 of these in a single machine. Check it out
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