Slashdot Mirror
Extreme Linux Server Available to North America
jcasman writes "CNet is covering an announcement from Japanese Linux provider Plat'Home on a low-cost, super tough Linux-based server, now available in the US, that can handle extreme heat and cold. 'The OpenMicroServer is kind of an "extreme" use server pushing the boundaries for normal, low-cost hardware. In a 624-day endurance test, the OpenMicroServer performed normally under 122 degree F conditions. The unit also employs a power efficient AMD Alchemy (MIPS) CPU and precise part placement based on thermo-fluid analysis to achieve semi-hermetic construction.'"
50 degrees Celsius for the rest of the world.
So this server shouldn't get slashdotted?
I say we test it.
import system.cool.Sig;
Ok, so it's wide temperature range, low power, and low cost. How about some more detail?
...)
- Actual power consumption. (How does it vary with load and temperature? What voltage (range) is required?)
- Price.
- Processor speed.
- Internal memory. (Disk? Flash? How much RAM?,
- I/O ports. (How many? What are they?)
Etc.
TFA was fluff.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
BUT - will it run linu..... oh, nevermind.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Being from a cold weather climate where I can see several applications for outdoor applications, I am curious as to what they mean by "down to the freezing point (0 degrees F)." Surely they meant 0 Celsius.
An extreme end server that is ruggedized against severe temperatures has potential value in a number of areas. First, it certainly meets the thermal requirements for military-grade systems, so I would expect to see this getting some interested looks from that direction. Severe temperatures have killed voting machines, so that's another place that might be very interested in this server. Commodity e-voting with far more reliable hardware will sound a LOT more atractive to many States. The range isn't extreme enough to support some of the really harsh environments out there, but it would be good enough to get a tracked vehicle with a hose attachment into places too hot and too dangerous for human firefighters who wouldn't be able to stay that close to a fire.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sorry if I'm not overly impressed.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
If its Xtreme then it has to be good!
How well does it work in a condensing atmosphere?
It's easy to work down to 0C when conditions are perfectly dry, it's another story when everything starts to sweat.
And what kind of airflow are we talking about when operating at 122F ambient?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
...isn't that Jumbo frame?
ALICE: Ambiguous: Ask who, what or where is Ralph Kramden ?
How can something be "semi"-airtight? Does this mean that if you plug it in and drop it into the bathtub with you, you'll only end up semi-dead?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of MOONS!!!!
It looks like free samples are available for testing.
http://www.plathome.com/products/microserver/rental.html
Though, it looks like you have to return it eventually.
I notice that this hardware supports JumboFLAME. I thought this had something to do with the temperature extremes, but after further investigation it seems to be another R/L discrimination problem.
Definition for JumboFlame in Japanese (translation)
But will it run Vista?
So say we all
latin: statim
What is the difference between celsius and centigrade?
In practical terms nothing.
In technical terms 'centigrade' scale is defined as having zero at the melting point of ice, and 100 at the boiling point of water at standard atomopheric pressure. While celsius is defined as the kelvin temperature - 273.15.
The reason for the difference was that the melting point of water is hard to measure precisely, due to the mechanics of melting creating an insulating layer of meltwater around the ice, that you can't simply stir to remove because that would introduce heat...which obviously is counter productive.
So they redefined it in terms of Kelvin which could be measured more precisely, and renamed it to make it unambiguous which definition was being used.
And where does "stat" come from when used in medical dramas?
stat is from the latin 'statim', which just means 'immediately' or 'at once'.
You do not know what "precise part placement based on thermo-fluid analysis to achieve semi-hermetic construction" means?
Well, lets break it up:
a) "precise part placement"
b) "thermo-fluid analysis"
c) "semi-hermetic construction"
It means that
A) the CPU is placed close to the case, so B)the case functions as a heat sink. Therefore, no fan is needed and the box is C) dustproof.
This happens to be a fairly common design.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
As someone who actually sits in the tally room on election night, please STFU. We paided $2500 per touchscreen voting maching in my county in 2005 and have funding scheduled for replacements in 2020. Where in the hell can you buy a machine (for any purpose) that lasts 15 years and costs $2500?
Outside of issues with printers getting jammed on election night, we have zero issues with hardware. I've worked on ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia equipment. Trust me, it all sucks because they are all broke and recertifing your product costs about $4,000,000.
Hardware is not the issue. The issue is that voting machine companies upgrade their clients hardware once every 10 - 20 years and make minimal profits off the support because *GASP* they can't attract decent upper management due to zero growth in the industry. They get crap programmmers for the same reason. The hardware is all off the shelf mini-itx motherboards. It doesn't have problems.
Software is an issue and will continue to be so until the government actually starts to pay more for voting machines or nationalizes the industry. I've sent bug fixes(Yes, I've modified their code and sent it back to them. Any clerk's office can get access to the source by signing an NDA.), and they don't roll them in until 2 or 3 years down the road due to the cost of getting certified.
Producing patches would bankrupt any voting machine vendor as you have to get recertified from top to bottom anytime you change the code.
But yes, I'm sure you are right. Local governments are just dieing for this. It's not like you couldn't fit a homeless shelter inside most current voting machines as it is. I'll give you a clue. They are huge for a reason.
You people need to stop talking when they have no clue what you are talking about. The voting machine industry is a mess for a lot of reasons, and if you want to fix it, I suggest you stop reading slashdot and start studing for the law bar.
The specs on one page mentions PowerPC.
Also what is the suggested retail price of this?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The product webpage says it's only available in the U.S. -- the headline is misleading.
Many evolutionary servologists believe that the computers that function in modern server room environments share a common ancestor that existed before air conditioning and electric power generation. Ancient servers were likely powered by sulfur compounds and operated at much higher temperatures and pressures.
With titles like "Extereme Linux Server", what will have next? "Linux servers gone wild" maybe? ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I just came back from the Embedded Systems Conference, where you see systems running on shake tables, or submerged in aquaria. With fish. -18C to 50C is not an industrial temperature range. Normally, the "commercial range" is 0C to 70C, and "industrial range" is -40C to +85C. It's all solid state memory, so there's not much of a temperature problem at the low end, as long as the humidity is low enough to avoid condensation or ice. "Thermo-fluid analysis to achieve semi-hermetic construction." - right.
Also, the thing has a MIPS processor, and it's a bit late for that. It's not even AMD product any more; the Alchemy line was sold off to Raza years ago.
Doesn't semi-hermetic = non-hermetic? It's either airtight or it's not.
Regarding Celsius/centigrade, while the name change happened a few years after the change in definition, I don't think you can consider them to be separate scales. Some people still say "centigrade" and when they do so you have to assume that they're just using the wrong name, rather than start converting.
Plus, Kelvin is itself based on the triple-point of water so we can't say that Celsius is based on water and centigrade isn't. They're really just synonyms.
Also 0K is a theoretical state of absolutely no heat. i.e by definition there can't be anything colder than 0K. There is no -1K.
The closest thing to 0K is outer space, which is around 3K because of the background radation, without which it would probably be 0K.
3K is about -270C, which is very darn cold. Try to think about that the next time you watch the space-walking-without-a-suit scene from Sunshine(2007).
Acutally, you can survive a limited amount of time exposed to space. See 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C Clarke knew what he was talking about.
Yes, space is very very cold. But vacuums are very good insulators, so there isn't much to take the heat away from you other than radiation, which is a very slow process to lose heat by. Your blood will boil from the low pressure before you'd freeze or suffocate.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
... it runs NetBSD
I wasn't trying to argue otherwise. I'm just saying that it's something fun to think about when you watch that scene.
An interesting side note though: I wonder how reliable those estimations are. I mean it's not like we've exposed human test subjects to outer space to check how long it takes them to die, right?
Or did we...?
Now there is something to think about. Maybe the Russians or Chinese have put it to the test?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Thanks for pointing out the link. It gives MOST of what I want.
(I see it's got lots of nice ports but requires an external modem,
which also must be hardened, low power, temperature capable, etc.)
Unfortunately, I'm still in the dark about one very important thing:
They give lots of info on the range of acceptable power INPUT TO THE INCLUDED WALL WART. However they give no such info on the 12V input to the device itself. Is the external supply handling the stabilization of that broad range of power input or is that a capability of the device itself.
Is it suitable, for instance, for hooking directly to a 12V renewable energy system or plugging directly into an automotive power supply? That means operates and is undamaged by sustained voltages between 11.75 and 14.5V, with transients far above and below that. (Protection against accidental polarity reversal and auto-shutdown if voltage has a sustained drop below 11.75V to prevent damage to batteries are also a good idea. "Sustained" in the low voltage case means tens of seconds: You don't want it to go belly-up when an engine is cranked.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you were the least bit serious and genuinely wanted a ruggedized voting system that could last 10-15 years on a continuous run without maintenance, I could build vastly superior machines to the ones you get for $1,500 initially, perhaps half that if you ordered in bulk. If you wanted printers that could never jam, that would be harder but I don't regard it as even in the realms of difficult. I see no reason why I couldn't design and build you a jamless printer with equal warranty if that is what you really wanted. My guess is that a fair-sized fraction of Slashdot - probably 2,000 of the 100,000 readers to visitg regularly - could do at least one or both of these tasks.
It is also interesting that independent observers and those to voted in the last few elections complained of machines overheating far more than they complained of paper jams (where paper was supplied). Are you saying that all these people lied and you are the sole bearer of truth? You may well be telling the truth about the machines you monitored, but how dare you insinuate that all those other folks were out-and-out liard, unless you have definite proof they were?
Above all, how dare you tell the technical community that we're mere "slashdot readers" when most of us can build vastly superior machines, maintain machines to a higher standard, or even just know how to keep a bunch of rollers clean? Unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, and run the comparison, don't tell us what we can and cannot do.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Scully, are you familiar with the Apollo 18 mission? It was a secret launch to test the survival times of unprotected humans in space.
But Mulder, that's crazy, the government would never--
Would never what, Scully? Never kill to hide the TRUTH? Never cover up what the public has a right to know?
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Or Short Circuit (1986) :-)
So by the time you buy it, the darned thing's already been obsolete for a year and a half or so?
This actually looks like something I could use. I am considering building a mock up of a data center in my condo. The big problems are lack of space, noise, heat, and power. I'd be interested to know the price of one with minimal specs. I'd like to put 6 of these in my closet, and have one run as a NAS, and the other as routers, firewalls, and servers. If they are under $500 I would highly consider them. Putting a real 19" rack in the closet with real 1u or 2u servers is just amazingly hot and noisy. But 6 of these stacked on top of each other with a fan-less switch (anyone know of a good one?) seems like a good option.
Namaste
If you wanted printers that could never jam, that would be harder
;)
Actually, that would be trivial if you were "doing it right": don't use the ultra cheap thin thermal paper, and engineer the printer so that paper is fed straight through it (for instance, the paper path runs along the side of the device, from the top to the bottom, with the print head in the middle underneath the paper path facing up (so that the ballot comes out face down). It could be done the other way around, but with the printer inside the device, the paper path can be accessed via a simple thin hinged cover to replace paper or unjam it in the event that it does jam). If you go with non-thermal paper, bonus points if you use a printer from a company that doesn't charge $50 per mL of ink.
Also, excellent comeback, though "liard" has got to be up there with "paided"
Thanks! As for my typos...Argh! Laird and visitg. (Yep, I found another typo in my post.) Gah. Well, at least at this rate I should be getting an offer to be a Slashdot editor. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Here's a handy link for FLOTHERM. It'll give you the gist of it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Or Heinlein's "Gentlemen, Be Seated," Argosy, May 1948. ;-)
Reprinted in The Green Hills of Earth
Of course that type of experiment is entirely unethical and immoral and we'd have to disregard any result taken from it. Right? ;-)
Right?!
"...semi-hermetic construction"
I have a step brother who occasionally works in the construction business too, so what?
so what does it cost then?
Deus est fatalis
AMD no longer owns the Alchemy product line, they sold it to Raza Microelectronics. Specs for the chip used (Au1550) are here:
http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/products_alchemy/au1550_overview.htm
I have done several designs with the part, and for the most part it's well thought out and it works really well. Unfortunately it's getting a bit long in the tooth and could do with some upgrading.
-- All that's left of me, is slight insanity, whats on the right, I don't know. -- Bob Mould
Chimpanzees were deliberately exposed to vacuum in testing. They survived as well.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Really? I had always been taught the Kelvin was based on absolute zero. It was just for convinence that the units were on the same scale as celsius/centigrade.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
It's the rapid decompression that freezes, not the vacuum.
Isn't centigrade based on 0: melting point of water, and 100: boiling point of water, and celsius based on -273.15: 0 kelvin(absolute 0) and 0.01:triple point of water? Anyway, shouldn't matter for 99.9% of people.
We are looking for corporate customers who wish to use the MicroServer series for their appliances. See our overview of MicroServer applications.
We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers.
Nice, advertise a product that a lot of people can't have, and not even note a reseller in the US. That's not really the best way if you're going to advertise to the public at large.
Underspend on quality and end up overspending on time/money.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers. D'OOOOHH! Whatamigonnado? I NEED this!!
Good for -40 to +85C
http://www.ampro.com/Products/RuffSystem/
Want other vendors? Just check out the Embedded Systems Conference, which happens several times a year
This is good, because I plan on running a cluster in Hell. What I would like to know is whether or not it is resistant to gay christian right republicans, because there will be a lot of them there.
I don't want to no gay christian republicans all up in my box (And I mean that in every conceivable way).
Also, in the event that hell freezes over, or snowballs do, in fact, have a chance, or we experience, merely, a cold day in hell, I need to know whether it will survive a hard freeze. I for one continue to be disappointed in the fact that servers like this don't come with notoriously insulating Unix beards. By which I mean Unix beards, the dudes, not Unix beards, the beards. We could cut one open like a tauntaun (Unix beard, the dude) and stick the box inside.
And then there is smugness shielding. I don't want Satan all up in my grill about uptimes lasting an eternity, which I totally fucking plan on attaining. I for one will not be rebooting every 48 hours for some stupid Vista upgrade.
Also, do the gates of hell constitute a "firewall"? There's a lot of fire there, and it is kind of wallish. Is port 80 open? Does god forbid export of strong crypto to hell? Are codecs free in the afterlife? Will I be sued by SCO? Because you know they'll all be in hell, and you know Satan has strong connections with Microsoft and lots of capital.
There will be a lot to navigate (I hear the ferry o'er the river styx is completely wallpapered in hardcore pornographic images of Maureen O'Gara in flagrante delicto with Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs.
I need a server up to the challenge. Is this it?
Completely incorrect. The meltwater will be handily at zero celcius until all of the ice has melted - it's a nice simple example of how the temperature remains constant until you get the energy required to change phase. Zero is that point precisely because it is an easily acheived stable and known temperature. One hundred is chosen for the same reason of a phase change that takes time and gives you a constant temperature - at standard atmospheric pressure the water and steam will be 100 until most of the water is gone. Superheated steam (more than 100 celcius) needs a different pressure or no liquid water at all.
Also the stirring is irrelevant unless it is a small container with a large heat gradient.
I guess the makers of this board are more with technical trends than Slashdot users.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Infact although space may be recognised as "cold" the coldest temperature ever recorded was here on earth in a lab at around -260C~ the theory behind absolute zero still as yet has not been achieved and is debateable weather it ever will be as it would have to be devoid of all energy. One could raise the point would it be devoid of all matter too?
total vacuum just sucks
You need two points (or one point and the size of one step) to define a scale.
In kelvin's case it is:
0 K is at absolute 0
273.16 K is at the triple point of water
Celius is defined with the same two points, as -273.15 C and 0.01 C. This definition makes the freezing point of water approx. 0 C and the boiling point approx. 99.9839 C
Some of the above may have been shamelessly ripped from Wikipedia. "Degrees" character removed because Slashdot mangles it into "Â".
finally, hardware built with the needs of penguins in mind, Linus is probably shedding tears of joy, icy tears mind
prepare the survey weasels.
The firewall. It's made of burning iron, and completely blocks TCP/IP traffic. The only packages allowed through have to be carried by "Messengers", it is a kind of advanced pigeon post. No information about bandwdidth.
Many parts of Hell are at room temperature. There is a region which is almost ideal for hosting servers (continuous air currents) but it is unfortunately in the DMZ. Your best bet is to place your server in the region of the Giants, which is at a convenient temperature and is largely unpopulated. Alternatively you might want to consider extreme cooling, in which case Antenora is your best site.
You could probably power it by getting a few damned souls to operate a treadmill. I expect that Satan could easily come up with a few candidates.
You won't get data over the Styx, the outbound bandwidth is terrible. You might just possibly be able to run a fibre cable down the centre of the Earth (where there is a backdoor), but making the connection at the other end could be sheer Purgatory.
Finally, don't trust the on site IT staff. Make sure all critical work is done by external contractors. Above all, do not sign any contracts in blood or you may find yourself on the permanent staff.
The following information is not in the manual:
There is plenty of crypto in Hell but it is completely unbreakable. It is the punishment of former KGB agents and CIA analysts that they have to work on cracking it forever.
You will not need to worry about Republicans, Evangelical Christians, Islamic extremists etc. They all have their own section of Hell, and it is part of their punishment to believe that they are the only people there.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Actually, the vacuum of space is not the coldest we know of. Humans can do better than that!
A few labs have gotten ridiculously close to absolute zero (although according to the laws of thermodynamics, they can never actually reach it).
"In September 2003, MIT announced a record cold temperature of 450 pK, or 4.5Ã--10â'10 K in a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms. This was performed by Wolfgang Ketterle and colleagues at MIT." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero#Additional_Information
Their 'for customers' page (here) clearly states: "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers."
In other words, this device is "available"... if you're a company rich enough to buy many of them. It's not "available" if you just want to buy one to play around with at home.
This is like those nifty SSD devices which are also not being sold directly to consumers.
These companies refuse to sell directly to consumers, presumably because they don't want to maintain a consumer-facing customer-service department. However, this is small comfort to those of us geeks who don't need a customer-service department...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I think putting a fragile harddrive would be counter-productive. Solid-state mass storage is the way to go in harsh environment. Great for an embedded system, but there is no way to add a hard drive, short of the USB ports. Given the specs of the server, I think that's the intended use :
You put this server in the harsh environment where it has to interact (say, doing measure outdoor near a remote scientific station) and plug the probes in the USB port. The data it self is processed on the normal server that resides in the safe environment on *the other side* of the GB connectors.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, air getting into it wouldn't really be the problem in that scenario, now would it?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Heat is the energy making a particle move and vibrate, removing all of it results in an inert particle, not no particle.
And I believe its a part of the laws of thermodynamics that absolute zero is unobtainable... its self evident if you think about it - however cold you make something, it's always going to be gaining a little heat from its surroundings, unless those surroundings are colder than it is. Colder than absolute zero cannot happen, therefore anything that approaches it will reach a point above zero where it can't be cooled any further.
It is well documented that the definition of a celsius/centigrade degree was redefined from melting/boiling to being based on absolute zero and the triple point of water, but the above is the only -reason- I've ever heard for WHY it was redefined that way. What have you heard?
The meltwater will be handily at zero celcius until all of the ice has melted - it's a nice simple example of how the temperature remains constant until you get the energy required to change phase.
There's 0 and there's 0.001. I seem to recall that the meltwater surrounding the melting ice has a different level of air saturation that becomes insulating leading to very small temperature variations. Making it hard to pin down the melting temperature past a certain level of precision.
Meanwhile the triple point could be measured reproducibly to within 0.00001K or something like that, which was better than they could get for melting water.
Sort of the same idea for redefining a meter in terms of a wavelength, instead of a metal bar. It could be measured more precisely, and with greater reproducibility.
From Plat'Home Customer page: US Customers We are looking for corporate customers who wish to use the MicroServer series for their appliances. See our overview of MicroServer applications. We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers.
MTSBWY
Please do not try to bring extreme precision not available when the definition was set in to change an argument into one that can be won. The discussion was about celcius as it was defined to measure it some time ago and not kelvin as it is possible to measure it now. Also take not that it is still a phase transition that allows a constant temperature to be found and that this one was chosen because it was very close in temperature to the already established one of meltwater.
In my case I am talking about degrees Celcius.
Actually, we've done a *lot* better than -260C - to get to liquid helium you need to be down below about 3K, which is -268C or so, and any good university research lab should be able to get there. You get to some of the more exotic cooling systems that form Bose-Einstein condensates, you can get down to literally a few millionths of a degree K away from absolute zero, so -271.15 and a smidgen....
I'll get my coat....
Plat'Home does not sell them directly to private customers, but you can order the sister model OpenBlockS (this one is even smaller) at Fatgadget:
http://www.fatgadget.jp/e_products/openblocks.html
Right?!
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I don't think space agencies are daring enough in their experimentation : I'd be willing to participate in some such experiments, if I were convinced of the payoff being sufficient (good experimental design making the work useful ; good pay ; if I die, my family continue to receive my full wages until they're dead ; some other Ts & Cs) and the risks suitably low. As a scuba diver, I'm quite attached to, and appreciative of, my lungs ; that doesn't mean not taking calculated risks - I've seen the spinal sections on dead divers that disabuse notions of scuba being harmless. Everything is harmful, starting from oxygen and working to more complex materials.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Every day that I travel to work I don environmental survival clothing to extend the duration of a person downed into cold water. It's a tool, which I've not had to use - yet ; every 2 to 3 years I have to demonstrate my competence at using this and other tools. And every 3 to 5 years we lose a helicopter engine or nearly crash into one of the rigs while we're travelling to work. Swimming home in a mid-winter North Sea is something that makes my arse twitch every time I go to work.
Unlike most of my colleagues, I've read the details of where the design work on our survival equipment was started, and what it entailed. It wasn't very good science and wasn't well done; the concentration camp victims (prisoners of religion, politics, sexuality, or conscience) that were killed in the experiments were of very variable degrees of malnutrition and stature, but this was poorly recorded, and their condition monitoring wasn't consistent. But their deaths did found the measurement of exposure. And that is something that I'm thankful for every time I pull that goon suit on over my woolly bear. Equally, I'm thankful for the work that has been done since (largely on poverty-stricken volunteers for various navies around the world) to verify the original work and to understand better how to keep people away from the "nearly dead of hypothermia" limits that the Nazis tried to establish.
Just because the experimental protocols used in the original work were repulsive doesn't make the data acquired untouchable ; equally, the utility of data acquired by unethical means shouldn't protect experimenters from punishment or public condemnation.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
CERN's hadron collider is going to have an operating temprature around 2K.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.