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IBM Touts Supercomputers for Enterprise
Stony Stevenson writes "IBM has announced an initiative to offer smaller versions of its high-performance computers to enterprise customers. The first new machine is a QS22 BladeCenter server powered by a Cell processor. Developed to power gaming systems, the Cell chip has also garnered interest from the supercomputing community owing to its ability to handle large amounts of floating point calculations. IBM hopes that the chips, which currently power climate modeling and other traditional supercomputing tasks, will also appeal to customers ranging from financial analysis firms to animation studios."
If specialized hardware returns to vogue, then there problems will crop up with the new specialized hardware. Dude face it, if you are a sysadmin, God will provide you with your share of things to complain about. It is the natural working order of things.
I got a catholic block.
> Personally, I'm sick of managing farms of
> physical servers, and with the introduction of
> VMWare, I'm now managing 3x the number of
> machines (albeit virtual machines).
All those Virtual machines to do the same thing with 4 times the resources as one well configured Linux box. Tsk Tsk.
Oh, but don't you LOOK busy.....
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
> Have an FTP server? Run that in it's own image. Also have a syslog server? Yet another virtual machine.
Which as you have no doubt discovered, are sort of a PITA to administer because they're all in separate VMs. I suspect the next big thing in commodity server virtualization will be nice management interfaces and protocols that break down some of the management walls between VMs, while still leaving the more important parts of the virtual environment intact. And being able to change the hardware assigned to a VM on the fly will probably become more common, too. I'd give it 5 or 6 more years, and VMWare will probably have managed to reinvent the LPAR.
Gotta love how this stuff goes around in cycles. Anything cool today in microcomputers was probably boring people to tears 10 or 15 years ago on large systems. (Cf. multitasking, multiple users, parallel processing, network-oriented filesystems, virtualization, hypervisors...)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."