Creating a Low-Power Cloud With Netbook Chips

Al writes "Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have created a remarkably low-power server architecture using netbook processors and flash memory cards. The server design, dubbed a 'fast array of wimpy nodes,' or FAWN, is only designed to perform simple tasks, but the CMU team say it could be perfect for large Web companies that have to retrieve large amounts of data from RAM. A set-up including 21 individual nodes draws a maximum of just 85 watts under real-world conditions. The researchers say that a FAWN cluster could offer a low-power replacement for sites that currently rely on Memcached to access data from RAM."

Comments

Next Generation

[glitch23]

This is the next generation of a Beowulf cluster using the next-generation of hardware which is cooler, cheaper CPUs and solid-state storage and memory. Someone was bound to come up with this idea because it only makes sense. It is good to know that we have a proof of concept now so someone else can take the idea and modify it to come up with something even better. Eventually hardware manufacturers will take notice and release it as COTS hardware. For companies who want cooler and cheaper server hardware this would be a good fit once it has been packaged as a COTS product.

Re:Cradle to Grave

[drizek]

I think with the grave you are screwed either way, but with the cradle you should keep in mind that atom processors are TINY. In fact, they are one tenth the size of a nehalem processor, meaning they require about a tenth of the resources to produce. Assuming that they will be replacing a dual socket system, you break even. A quad socket system gives the atoms the win. The real problem is going to be in manufacturing all those motherboard chipsets.

Wait, what?

[Enry]

256M per node times 21 nodes equals 5GB. 84 watts is nice, but I just built a home server with 4GB of RAM and 2 1TB drives that has a low power AMD chipset in it. At idle, it's about 70 watts, and gets to about 100 watts when under load. Replacing the two 1TB drives with an 80GB SSD would probably be closer to what if represented with FAWN.

Figuring $100 for the motherboard and parts makes that total system cost $2100. My server was about $500.

Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting idea. Using an Atom can get you a lot more performance for not much more power use, and you can go up to at least 2GB RAM per node. But there's a limit to how small you can make a single item in a cluster before you're duplicating effort without much benefit.

Re:Wait, what?

[CAIMLAS]

That may (and really is) true. But how well does your machine work with concurrency? Or, for that matter, how fast is the processor?

8Gb of RAM is nice and all, especially with modern software and emulated environments. But how many

For a web-facing system - or anything serving multiple requests per second from different locations, with multiple threads all needing a quick response - having 21 500MHz cores would be much better than having 4 2.6GHz cores. That is, provided you could handle distributing the requests in an efficient manner. And the RAM limitation isn't really much of a limitation, when you consider that any one thread is not likely to use nearly 256Mb, for a web query, stored procedure, etc..

At any rate, this is a proof of concept (and really, not such a good one when you consider what's possible). The benefit is the number of cores in the system and how well you could serve up data, not so much the total amount of RAM.A better implementation could, very likely, be done for roughly the same cost (or less) utilizing similarly clocked multicore ARM processors. Take twenty 2 cores per board, 512Mb+, 500Mhz systems, cluster them... it starts getting impressive in the workload (and reduced I/O wait).

In theory, at least.

Re:New buzz words?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess the word cloud has replaced cluster to give old technology a fresh new look.

A cluster is a cloud when it is sufficiently large and the nodes are sufficiently small, like the water vapour of a cloud. Isn't is poetic?

Re:Toy.

[jonsmirl]

You can beat this with an array of Pogoplugs at $99 each. They draw under 5W and have 512MB RAM, 512MB flash and GbE. Stick a 64GB USB stick into it. They about about 3in square.

Pogoplug is same thing as a Marvell SheevaPlug.

Simple economics

[dj245]

This argument is misinformed.

Businesses are in business to make money and put food on the table. Nobody does anything for free. If I build a widget and it costs me $10 in electricity, $5 in heating, and $3 in cooling, my widget is going to be $18 more expensive as a result. Now, I don't do things for free, so I'll just add $18 to the cost of my widget. Probably $20 because I want some more markup for my trouble.

Energy costs are always included in anything you buy. If the initial+electrical cost of buying Widget Z instead of Widget Y is better, then it is probably less energy intensive if you consider the whole system.