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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."
imagine a beo..... oh forget it
I tried but I couldn't resist. I reloaded three times and i was still first post
When I started this post, I was thinking that the overall power usage of building 21 computers that run at 85 W might supersede the power usage of building one 1000 W computer with 32 GB of memory, if you take the whole process from manufacturing to disposal.
But I suppose it's the electric bill of the company we're concerned with so I'll just sit in the corner and re-read Bambi.
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.
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Weird choice. I suggested a while ago using a set of OMAP3 chips in blade servers. You can get a 600MHz ARM CPU, 512MB of flash and 256MB of RAM in a single package-on-package module, with a power usage of under 1W. Put an 8x8 grid of them on a board and you've got a nice little wedge of server power at well under 64W. Use a bit SAN elsewhere in the rack and you've got a set of machines you can bring online easily for individual users. You could assign individual ones to different users / customers and just plug in more when they were needed. If I were doing it now, I'd be tempted to use one of the newer Freescale ARM designs that goes to around 1GHz and has on-die Ethernet controllers.
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So I guess the word cloud has replaced cluster to give old technology a fresh new look. Gotta love marketing.
And since when did the term netbook come to describe low power computing hardware? There have been mini-ITX boards with low power CPU's long before the term netbook was in use. Just more marketing bullshit, repackage existing tech with a shiny new name and sell it.
Or to put it simply: pulling a "finished" object from memcached will almost always be faster then having a machine create/render/whatever you do to create the object. If you want to pull large amounts of data from RAM buy a 1U server that takes 64 gigabytes of ram for $5000 (so about $78 per gig of ram, and much faster than a compact flash card in a super cheap laptop). Or buy solid state disks/PCIe RAM cards. Now if we're talking about building a render farm for whatever (frames, objects in database, etc.) simply run the numbers, how many objects/sec/dollar do you get with different solutions and how important is latency.
What interests me is the ease of building a many node cluster and learning how to administer and write software for something with 20+ nodes.
Of course you could just buy computer time from amazon.com EC2 for $0.10 per hour per node and practice there ($2 an hour for 20 systems running. not bad).
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.
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.
Why did you have the cat push it off the desk? Were you too lazy to do it yourself?
OR, skip 1-6 and just get a RAMSAN.
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.