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Hardware Headaches Inevitable?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hardware-is-always-a-headache dept.

JaneWalker6847 writes "Don Becker, co-founder of the Beowulf project, describes the inevitability of hardware administration headaches and warns users not to expect a silver bullet to solve these problems." From the article: "We're about to see another revolution, which is in network adapters -- that we [will] talk directly to [them] from application level. That's a massive change in how you interface with them. And that brings about a new round of device drivers completely unlike the device drivers we had 10 years ago. So, that part of the world isn't going to stabilize anytime soon."

4 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Re:revolution indeed by addaon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Try 10Gb ethernet.

    --

    I've had this sig for three days.
  2. Re:revolution indeed by Masa · · Score: 3, Insightful
    In the future we will probably see things like SSL encryption being performed on the card as well.
    If I remember correctly, there was once upon a time encryption accelerator cards for servers to release some stress from CPUs. They were discarded as obsolete because the CPU power kept growing and in the end, the pure CPU calculation power was much more greater than with these accelerator cards. It would have required constant hardware investments to keep the cards up to speed with ever-growing CPU speeds.

    It seems that these old cards are on sale on the eBay and [when I look those other search results] also some are sold as new, so I guess that this is still viable technology in some places: http://www.google.com/search?q=ssl+encryption+acce lerator+card

    Anyway, I just have this feeling that it's not a good idea to integrate any kind of encryption technology directly to the card.

    Hmm... Do I smell WinModem?
  3. Standarization by bn557 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't believe that most places that would benefit from an 'advancement' like this would tolerate a moving standard. If a company revises a card because the standard changes, it sure as hell had better support whatever the previous standard is because some company running 10,000 of these cards in some massive distributed application won't accept anything but plug and go.

    The idea that your original hardware vendor can provide you with a drop in replacement for a failed card is nice, but any decent manager is going to ask you what the plan is for when that vendor goes under. You need to know that you can just buy some card off the shelf and put it in and have it work. At least with our current driver/hardware structure, you know that a 3com nic is going to work. Or if 3com goes under, you can drop an intel nic in. You may have to install the driver for the card, but it's not going to (unless you start messing with dirty cheap hardware) have compatability issues.

    I guess my point here is, there's no way a bunch of companies would target big business with a product like this without there being SOME standard interface. Who wants a multimillion dollar migration to 100% proprietary hardware?

    --
    Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
  4. Re:revolution indeed by hackstraw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hmm... Do I smell WinModem?

    I'm not sure what that smell is, but its familiar.

    Yes, TCP/IP offloaders, crypto offloaders, physics offloaders, FFT offloaders, have all existed. The only accepted offloader that has succeeded is the GPU, and that is because it was subsidized by the high end graphics people and people with game addictions. The cost/benefit of the other offloaders has not proven itself. Especially when you consider the rate of increase of the CPU speeds and the bottleneck of getting the data to the offloaded chip and back again. The Linux kernel mailinglist has been pretty much anti TCP/IP offloading because the time spent optimizing the drivers and the performance increase was often surpassed in a few months with a faster general purpose CPU and a generic driver that worked with all cards. This is also confounded when you have OS level TCP/IP stuff like ipchains or iptables that need their code in the OS and not on the card. FFT and physics offloaders have not taken off because of the cost/benefit loss when one takes into account the speed loss of getting the data onto the card and then the cost of the cache RAM to put on the card (if its ever enough), and then the time to get the data off of the card.

    Now, what will make these things work?

    A bus that is near or at the speed of memory bandwidth or a problem where the data does not need to go back to the host system. A GPU falls into the second half there. The display needs to know what its told, the computer does not need to know the details. TCP/IP offloaders have failed to catch on because of the price/performance benefit and their lack of ubiquity and commonality. Crypto offloaders are cool. Especially for the geek factor of having the keys stored on the card and zeroed out when tampered with. But again, the cost of writing specific drivers vs known CPU drivers for doing crypto and the rate of increase of cheap commodity CPUs over time often exceeds the cost/benefit of the crypto card.

    Now, give me a fast bus and the ability to use my generic system RAM with one of these offloading cards, and things could change, but until then I expect this battle between the CPU and specific PUs to continue with no real winner.