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Yahoo! Orders Wikipedia Hardware
Edit This Page writes "Jimmy Wales announced today that Yahoo! has ordered 23 HP servers for the Wikimedia Foundation. The three database servers are model DL 385, and will come with dual Athlons, 8GB of RAM, and 6x 146GB 15K RPM drives each. They will also provide rackspace and bandwidth. The announcement comes four months after Google's announcement of support, and two months after Yahoo's own. Google has not yet made their intentions clear. You can read more about the specifications of what will soon be a 100+ server cluster at the Wikimedia Servers wiki article."
a me-too move. Good for the Wikipedia guys tho...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
As I write this, our developers are switiching the entire site over to Mediawiki 1.5 (from 1.4), and most of the changes will make it run faster. So we're lowering the per-transaction cost of the software and increasing the server capacity -- this is a good thing.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Wikipedia Hardware?! I didn't know they make hardware. Does anyone have the Wikipedia link for this? ;)
A beowulf clus... er, nevermind.
Does wikipedia seriously need all that? I thought the data they were serving up was mostly just text and wasn't really a huge problem. As in, weren't their current servers enough? Or am I missing something?
So it seems now that Wikipedia has more street cred than either Yahoo OR Google, since they're both clammering to be seen as being in support.
And with Google at aproximately 211 street cred units as of the last survey, Wikipedia is definitely doing well.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
The trouble of course with wiki-hardware is that the system adminstration is left to the community.
I love Wikipedia...hate the big guys supporting (influencing) them... but in the end, it'll only be good for Wikipedia, I suppose.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
The new servers are on fire already.
Some slashdotting
Shameless Plug!
They get their servers sooner than me.. I ordered a Opteron DL145 from hp.com over a month ago and it won't ship until next week.
In the meantime, we've had three Dell servers go through.. each delivered withing 5 business days.
We just ordered 25 more boxes from Dell, the original order was to compare the two types of systems before we placed our big order and Dell won by default 'cause HP just couldn't deliver(the Dell boxes are 20% cheaper as well).
No brainer.
Not Athlon
Only on Slashdot would Yahoo's donation be compared unfavorably to Google, when Yahoo has actually provided something, and Google has merely mentioned it.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Am I the only one seeing broken images all over Slashdot? It's been going on for days now.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Does anyone know why they are being set up in South Korea?
The server hardware spec link said the "athlons" in fact are opterons. *sigh*
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Seriously, that site needs the extra juice.
This is sort of like those school yard spats over a girl.
Wiki is the girl. Google and Yahoo are the two guys.
My mother's advice surely applies to this situation(that I got many years back):
"Stay away from that little trollop! Anyone that causes a fight is not worth it."
Of course, I did hang round that girl. Pretty wee thing. It was all fruitles of course.
Bitch! You whore Wiki!
*begins to cry*
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
...wikipedia is making hardware now and yahoo needs some...
Since I can't think of anything really insightful to say, I'll just say thanks.
Thanks to Yahoo, for supporting the Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to the Wikimedia folks and all of their contributors for their great contributions to what I hope will become (and is already on its way) one of the world's best disseminators of human knowledge. It's meant to be free, at least as in speech, but they're pulling it off as in beer, too.
Much kudos to them - One day when I'm not a poor college student, I'll help out. They've certianly made themselves worthy.
I wonder whether you could check out whether these are AMD Opteron - or AMD Athlon. I'll hazard a guess that you are referring to AMD Opteron, the really powerful ones Cray are now offering in their "Red Storm" supercomputers.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers
If you really mean Athlon then perhaps they have yet to be added to the breakdown in the above link.
For those interested in supercomputers based on Opteron then search engine submit for cray opteron red storm
Hey this is great! Nice to see Yahoo! supporting the largest blog on the net!
The governmental Dutch education organization also helped wikimedia set up servers in Amsterdam. It is unclear who paid for what but wikipedia is very happy about serving Europe straight from the big internet hub in Amsterdam.
n ts/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Announceme
Sounds like Yahoo! has decided to go above and beyond Google's "do no evil" pledge by actually making good.
Athlon MP chips can work in dual but wouldn't support 8 GB. Athlon 64 and Athlon FX chips do support 8 GB but can't work in dual. The servers in question use AMD Opteron chips.
The headline is misleading. How bout... Yahoo! orders hardware for Wikipedia.
I read it thinking "wiki sells hardware? wtf?!"
just a note.
Wikipedia was a great idea in theory but it is just too tainted with nonsense, girly egos, waffle and noise to be of any real benefit to those seeking information.
Generally speaking (but certainely not always), the technical and computing articles are of a fairly good quality, however other areas are little more than fan pages or adverts for the things they are describing. If you try and correct anyone about them they get all uppety with a kind of "Don't like it don't read it" or "This is how we do things around here" attitude. That's a real shame.
Seems to be a war to be the best "opensource" helper. See Google wants to help wikipedia, Yahoo helps wikipedia, Google makes Google summer code ...
;-) ?
What's next
Bonjour !
Google has provided --> Yahoo has provided.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Google's announcement that maybe they might possibly be providing some kind of support was probably from the 'omgilovetehgoogle!" dept.
Oh, and you got Google and Yahoo! mixed up there.
I hope this will make WikiPedia a little bit faster. Sometimes they're just way too slow because they can't handle the load.
Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google can do more good for China if they do not get blocked.
The unofficial
Dear Moderators. This sentence is currently rated 4, Funny.
Actually, mz001b made a valid point and all the donated hardware (which wikimedia is of course very thankful) has to be maintained by volunteers.
So if HP or IBM or whatever company feels like, they should consider donating a full-time-employee-equivalent-sponsorship to someone who is doing this great job. IMHO.
I read Belnet offered 22U rackspace, and bandwidth. Agreement is signed.
I wonder if there is somebody somewhere working on a peer-to-peer variant for distributing Wikipedia content and cutting some of the bandwidth costs.
Scroogle
It's nice they're all donating new hardware and such, but really...
who's gonna be paying those killer power bills?!?!
http://www.hostway.co.kr/aboutus/hwkorea.html
Just a hunch.
Finnaly, it seems that Yahoo is willing to help Wikipedia. Good job!
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Awesome joke, I'm in tears.
RTFA - it is the Wikipedia guys who are holding up Google's donation, not Google:
"Wikimedia's planned facilities in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Belgium, and Asia are not online yet, so it would be premature at this juncture to ask Google for something specific when we don't yet have good technical knowledge of what we will need in the coming months following the introduction of these new facilities. Google are eager to help us, and Wikimedia are eager to accept their help, but the Board want to be good stewards of donor money, and this requires them to move carefully"
Is it just me, or do you cringe when you see servers running fedora core X ....*shudder*
All three are public companies, and therefore obligated BY LAW to maximise shareholder profit. By taking a stand against china (and, therefore risking their financial stability) they would be BREAKING the law.
If you've been involved in politics for so long, this is something that you should already know.
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
While I don't see how the story summary makes Google out to be somehow better than Yahoo! here, I do think that this was a gratuitous Google mention for promotional value (name-dropping, albeit not mentioning famous people but instead famous organizations).
Digital Citizen
Oh wait, now we have to be careful to avoid the Yahoo! View of History being predominant on Wikipedia!
Look out!
The three database servers are model DL 385, and will come with dual Athlons, 8GB of RAM, and 6x 146GB 15K RPM drives each.
AFAIK, the DL385 is a quad-Opteron model. Athlon64 is only for desktops. Just saying.
Marcos
Reserch papers need to reference static content of a known quality, and published encyclopedias don't change every few minutes depending on the whim of some random reader who disagrees with a particular point.
And, other than pre-college schools, why would you use an encyclopedia or wiki anyway?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
They have a big cluster in the USA, they got just a few weeks ago 10 or so dual opteron servers in the netherlands (that will serve europe more or less completely), and these servers could take the asian part of load (plus increase redundance).
Its just wastefull routing everything around large parts of the globe, plus keeping the database in different phyiscal locations cant hurt, either.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
With public design wins like this sooner or later Dell will have to drop the "when our customers ask for Opterons we'll sell them Opterons" BS... I dobt it, But one can always hope that the world cheapest PC company will start stocking the wolds best desktop processors... some day.
Damn, and here was me thinking that when you operate in any given country, you are bound by their laws. thank you for showing me the light! *cough* if you have problems with chinese policy, take it up with the chinese government. dont take it out on companys that are only doing their jobs.
This is a classic case of considering the hardware to be the problem rather than the software. The software has serious issues when it comes to performance and the developers are very slow to address it. Hell, Tim Starling, a lead developer, even stated that one of the design goals of the MediaWiki software was to spend as little time as possible developing it. I kid you not, that's paraphrasing something (with NO exaggeration) that was said in a presentation document which I can find if anyone doesn't believe me.
I've heard some whining from some of the developers because they didn't have a ready made solution for certain things, meaning they would have to put actual *effort* into making their own. The idea of writing glue code (to C code) to make up for a feature lacking in existing php libraries was considered an abhorrent thing.
Their best response to me pointing out flaws in their "development philosophy" was to them retort with the oh-so-clever "well why don't you write something better yourself?" Of course, that phrase is just a code word for "we know it sucks and we're just not willing to put all the extra effort into rewriting major portions of it." Really, it's sad when you have to define your software in terms of someone else (your opponent specifically) not writing something better.
This isn't just unfounded complaints either. The developers have often complained that the existing implementation (and especially the choice to write the original code in PHP) needs to be rid of. They've said it has "everything and the kitchen sink" and that it degrades performance, but aren't trying that hard to get rid of it. They know this as a matter of fact through testing--Mediawiki has a massive overhead in setup time compared to other wiki software.
Not just that, but the Wikipedia admins are all volunteers and aren't exactly the cream of the crop. They took them as volunteers since they were the best ones to devote that much time to it and unfortunately that means they're mediocre and they REALLY are not experienced for such a high traffic website.
If they actually had a paid full time admin who had considerable background in sites like this, you'd suddenly see a massive drop in down time and other problems.
What address can I write an email to so that I may thank Yahoo for their donation? I'm a regular Wikipedia user and appreciate their gift, I think we should all give them some kudos.
Servers for you!
No servers for others!
Here is their servers list.
don't servers take up rack space? and isn't the amount of bandwidth you have available reliant on the pipe running to your servers and not the actual servers themselves?
..serving ads. I looked up a word on wikipedia and got long list of web/commercial results.
Am all pro-business, but if i need a web search i dont go to wikipedia.
All three are public companies, and therefore obligated BY LAW to maximise shareholder profit.
I keep hearing this, but I've never seen any statute which says that a public company has to do anything of the sort. How would it fit in with a company constitution which says "Do no evil"? Can you point out a link to this infamous law?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I'm very impressed that they are managing to pull off the performance they are getting, considering the tools they have to work with.
To start with, the software is written in PHP, and still has pointless DB accesses and dynamism on every page. For example, having to hit the DB if you are logged in in order to fetch your page prefs, display "You are logged in as so-and-so", and have the custom links to watchlist and user page. In my opinion the whole site should be static except when actually editing, checking login status, or performing some other function that must vary per-user.
But, they do many layers of caching (both whole-page and partial) already, and they do say that the vast majority of their load comes from users who aren't logged in, so maybe it is fine the way it is.
I'm still impressed, though.
Since I presumably have moderation to burn, I'll say frankly that I'm appalled. Wikipedia is enormously valuable as a resource in objective domains such as hard science and mathematics, but its articles in politically and culturally sensitive areas are abyssmal reflections of popular delusion and political correctness that do an enormous disservice to us all. The cockles of my heart not not warmed.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
In Soviet Russia site brings down Slashdot. Obligatory begging for high moderation: I know Im going to be modded troll..., mod me down, +5 funny.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
So that explains why the database is locked.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's a Wikipedia server admin that's speaking.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
... what a load of crap. What about publicly list ethical funds? Please, when you get a clue will you let us all know? We'd very much appreciate it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
... I'm about to become an admin... should I edit the front page? Nah :-)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Thanks for marking that as a troll mods. Thanks to marking a non-troll comment -1, I had no idea what was being replied to until the mod forced me to review comments at -1.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Standard citation procedure for websites is to provide the URL and the date and time you accessed it. With Wikipedia you can give the time and date you accessed it, along with the actual page you viewed. Can't think of anything more reliable than that.
If you want to reference the unstable latest copy, go ahead. That's the risk you will take when the one marking your paper looks at Wikipedia.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Can't argue that: we've done that three times already. That particular article was submitted to votes for deletion 3 times, and each time Wikipedia editors voted to keep the article.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Can somebody please edit the original post to say Opteron. This site is run by a load of iLovers who don't want to see any postitive PR for something more powerful and superior to XServe boxes.
If you moderate this then you just confirm this to be true.
Come on slashdot, you're editorial is factually incorrect and you are looking like having a bias against AMD by misreporting.
of course it doesn't helping running it off mysql and php, you could probably half your hardware costs running it off asp.net and sql server, but obviously shift the price up for Sql Server/w2k server. Which then starts the argument hardware/software, having used php for years and seen its lack of power compared to j2ee,asp.net,compiled cgi I know which i prefer.
Nothing costs nothing
PC machines multiply like rabbits. Big database projects should run on one or a few damn big zSeries or iSeries iron instead of a wabbit-farm of x86. Those run databasing from firmware and have buses that are up to CPU performance, unlike PCs.
It is so much el cheapo to run big projects on PCs. Not to mention hackers who can 0wn Linux PCs in minutes but couldn't hold a candle to monster mainframes.
Bull... It is not a search engine. It is an encyclopedia. It sends you to the most relevant article available. ie. if you search for animal rights, it sends you to 'Animal Rights'...
HAH! 300 baud acoustic coupler! ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The problem with Wikipedia performance isn't so much for readers (although, certainly, fast page loads are desired) but contributors. Wiki's depend on people adding content, editing things, discussing things, following links and doing random fixups and all sorts of other things like that. Sometimes, Wikipedia's performance gets so bogged that this becomes near-impossible. So yah, it's a real problem, and one the admin's are constantly having to deal with.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Clearly it wasn't, but if you like making slashdot viewers surf at -1, who am I to complain? After all, who cares if a genuinely interesting discourse is entered into on an issue that many people have pointed out as a flaw of Wikipedia?
Perhaps we should mark your comment as flamebait?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.