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Atom Processors Set New Record For Power-Efficient Sorting
schliz writes "German researchers have set a new record for energy efficient data sorting with a system based on netbook processors and Solid State Disks. The system, dubbed EcoSort, more than tripled the power efficiency of former record holders, leading one of its developers to claim: 'In the long run, many small, power-efficient and cooperating systems are going to replace the so far used, heavy weighted ones.' Records were defined by 'Sort Benchmark,' which was created by missing Microsoft scientist Jim Gray and was now managed by representatives of companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft."
As electricity and cooling bills get ever higher being more frugal with the power will count more and more on the bottom line. Congrats to the team on a new record!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...sorting farms, with thousands of netbooks...
Good to see that Jim's work lives on...meanwhile, this is about all you get in the article:
"EcoSort set records in the Joule category, which measured the amount of energy required to sort either 10GB, 100GB or 1TB of records.
It reached a maximum efficiency of 36,400 records sorted per joule for 100GB of data, using an Intel Atom 330 processor, 4GB of RAM, and four 256GB SSDs by flash vendor Super Talent Technology.
In 2009, a team from the University of Melbourne had the 100GB record of 11,600 records sorted per joule using the OzSort system, which comprised a 2.6GHz AMD processor, 4GB of RAM, seven 160GB 7200 RPM SATA hard disks and a Linux operating System."
Sure, this is the way things are going, but until prices come down we won't be seeing SSDs replacing HDDs; work fine for the desktop, tho'
The Via C7/Nano seems to be a great chip for a home/small office server, what with its built-in AES encryption making it faster than even a high end Xeon without hardware acceleration. My current setup consists of 2*WD SE16 hard drives, APC UPS, 80+ Corsair PSU, PC2500e Nano mobo with 1GB, and a couple of 80mm case fans, together running under 50W idle, and only 7W more at full CPU load. If I were to replace the Corsair with a fanless PSU good up to 80-120W I might get an extra 5-10% efficiency; I could wipe out the case fans probably with no problem (2-3W, say), especially if I replaced hard with spinning solid state storage, and that of course would shave off around 15W. Substitute a large fanless heatsink for another W (or just get a fanless motherboard/CPU in the first place). But even as-is, it's a good improvement on my previous regular desktop CPU-based setup.
For something which is on 24 hours a day, going several months between reboots and stressed only in the IO and encryption departments, I see no reason to use a full-power desktop processor. So, what problems have you guys encountered which has meant you haven't ended up with this option?
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Of course you set records, when most of your CPU actually sits in your north bridge. Yes. That thing with the large heat sink and fan, is the north bridge. Not the CPU. The CPU is that smaller chip that you thought were the NB.
It’s a fraud. Nothing else. A trick to hide their failure to get even in the same magnitude as ARM.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What the article fails to mention is the usage of the latest version of Ninnle Linux, nicely optimized for Atom processors. (I'm using it right here on this netbook.) Thanks to Ninnle, the system could be properly optimized, something that cannot happen within the current Windoze framework.
I had a few lectures with prof. Sanders, and as far as I remember, they try to optimize as much as possible for the target architecture by hand.
As impressive as this feat is, it is in no way generic or usable across multiple architectures as far as I remember, but I am very willing to be proven wrong.
It's easy for some marketing fools to say, "Oh, for sure, it'll last 5 to 10 years." It's easy for them to print those claims on the product packaging, too. But marketing claims don't, of course, have any real impact on the lifespan of a product.
We heard the same claims for CD-Rs years back. They'd last 99 years, we'd often hear. Now, less than 10 years later, people who backed up data onto CD-Rs are running into problems. Even when storing the burned CD-Rs properly, they have nevertheless developed unrecoverable read errors because they've degraded many times faster than expected.
Frankly, we can't say that these SSD drives will last 5-10 years straight, while saturated, especially while they really haven't been around for that long. Unless you've actually taken a drive and had it perform writes continuously for a decade, and can demonstratively provide that the drives will last that long before performance degrades, we have to assume the worst.
They measure the power at the wall and not on the CPU specifically, so there's no 'fraud' going on. Putting processing elements on the north bridge does nothing to gain this system an advantage. Reading the contest rules, they recommend power meters like this: http://www.brandelectronics.com/meters.html
...leading one of its developers to claim: 'In the long run, many small, power-efficient and cooperating systems are going to replace the so far used, heavy weighted ones.'
They're imagining the Beowulf clusters for us...
Records / joule might be interesting to some people, but it is a dangerous metric overall.
Why?
Because it ignores time.
It is accounted for somewhat in that there will be some power draw for spinning disks, or leakage; but all-in-all not good.
as this could drive the prices of ssd devices way down if big number crunching outfits decide to go with the solid state disks.
Jim Gray, Tim Bray... hm. Has anyone ever seen them in the same room together ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Similar performance, 1/10 the power consumption.
The Total Cost of Operation of a data center is more than half facilities and power than the chips. It looks to be more economical (TCO) to use low-power chips, and more of them, over the long run.
This assumes that we are limiting ourselves to digital media: You can sort any number of coins using no energy at all (besides gravity). http://www.algodoo.com/algobox/details.php?id=27217
But you'll have less density in terms of computing power, which means more racks and more floor space. I think the trend is toward higher power density. Once you add real estate costs, it is cheaper to run everything on fewer high powered CPUs than many Atoms although it may be less power efficient.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
hmm... A Cortex A8 with 64 floating point units and a video unit capable of 1080p encode on a card that measures 72mm by 50mm. This could be interesting.
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