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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."
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). Have an FTP server? Run that in it's own image. Also have a syslog server? Yet another virtual machine. I really hope this sells well. Maybe I can now play PS3 games in the datacenter.
That means that a PS3 running Linux, even with its ridiculously low 512MB RAM, can be used as a $500 development platform for these CellBE BladeServers.
And, in turn, some QS22 SW might be usable on the PS3, if it can be ported to use the tiny RAM. Or if someone hooks an i-RAM bank to the SATA port as swap/ramdisk, using perhaps iSCSI over its Gb-e for storage.
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make install -not war
Even though this might make me sound a bit off, we already have co-processors for video, network, etc. Why not go a bit further and specialize the hardware just a bit more. Let the Cell do all the real work and sandbox the user on the x86 cpu in a way that allows the user to be rather free in operation while the real work is done on the Cell processor in protected manner. That "should" be enough processing power to isolate the user completely from the tasks of the computer itself. The idea would be to sort-of create a mainframe/client environment where it would be nearly impossible for the user to accidentally introduce viri to the system.
The UI and i/o shelled through the x86 system. There are examples of this in some smaller embedded systems where system memory is separate from user memory etc. The details of this seem sketchy as I have not worked them out to any degree that would make the proposal sound workable thus far. I do know of examples where techniques like this are used to protect the 'system' while 'user agents' do what they want without the intrusion of security software at every turn. When the system is turned off, the user space is cleared. The protected system space is always protected.
Yes, that leaves room for infections on the Cell side to act like root kits as there is always some spot that is vulnerable, but it does offer a much more bullet resistant setup. The effects are not too different from working from a live CD all the time. Reboot and all is clean again, but with a more permanent and less inconvenient process. If you run some version of Linux/Unix on the client side, and strictly control the communications to the Cell side it becomes a much tighter box to try to squeeze a virus into. It may provide opportunity for the Cell side to monitor processes in the client/UI side meaning that keyloggers and such wou9ld become a thing of the past. In general, I mean to add horsepower by splitting system tasks from UI tasks and add a much stronger sandbox for the client to operate in, rather than continue lumping all the work on one cpu and letting security run in the same sandbox as the questionable software.
It's an idea... obviously I do not design motherboards or OSes for a living (IANACSPHD ??)
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