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SeaMicro Unveils 512 Atom-Based Server
1sockchuck writes "Stealthy startup SeaMicro has unveiled its new low-power server, which incorporates 512 Intel Atom CPUs, a load balancer and interconnection fabric into a 10u server. SeaMicro, which received a $9.3 million government grant from DOE to develop its technology, says its server uses less than 2 kilowatts of energy — suggesting that a single rack with four SeaMicro units and 2,048 CPUs could draw just 8 kilowatts of power. Check out the technical overview, plus additional coverage from Wired, GigaOm and VentureBeat."
The question is, how good is the performance for, say, intensive numerical computations? Is the gigaflop per watt convenient?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
...misread the headline as saying that somebody had made a server out of only 512 atoms (as in the particle, not the cpu)?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They're going to power a Ferrari out of 34.5 Vespa scooter engines.
Considering how many articles were linked I don't know if you rtfa'd or not.
The Core 2 uses a bit more than twice as much power, but if you have two Atoms you also need twice as many north-bridge chips and this pushes the power usage up to over what the Core 2 will consume.
This is from the wired article.
Just changing the CPU to a low power chip, though, isn't enough says SeaMicro. The trick lies in creating a new architecture that can pull all the chips together and manage their power requirements.
"If you just replace the chips in a traditional server with Atom processors, the power consumption actually goes up," says Feldman.
Integrating features such as storage, networking and server management into a single ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) helps manage power better, says the company. It has also virtualized the CPU input-output so those modules that would have otherwise occupied space on a board and consumed power don't anymore.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
That's not too hard to calculate. I usually budget 2 A for a dual-CPU 1u server. At 120 V, that's 240 W. 8 kW divided by 240 W = 33u of servers. Multiplied by 12 cores (allowing for the new X5600 series, ignoring hyperthreading on both Atom and Xeon), you get 396 total cores of standard Xeon in 8 kW. Meanwhile, they're advertising 2048 Atom cores in the same amount of power. So, the real question becomes how powerful ~5 Atom cores are compared to 1 Xeon core.
This is a good start- SM10000 System Overview
Interconnect is 1.28 Tbps or 2.5 Gbps per core.
I/O includes a minimum or 8 gige or 2 10-gige, which can be increased to 64 gige or 16 10-gige links per chassis.
This unit runs as 512 system images using stock 32 bit OS's. Each CPU may have 1 or 2 GB's of ram and up to 64 local drives may be installed and divided among the CPU's with the included management software. The unit supports PXE boot, so the system images may run off local disk or from a ram image.
Just to note, the Atom z530 is a single core, 32 bit only CPU, if that matters.
I couldn't tell you if the 16 10-gige links would seriously limit this box or not. You'd have to show me a data center with more than 160 Gbps of internet connectivity first. :) And that's assuming you only purchased one of these suckers, because you'd need that much per chassis.
The Internet has no garbage collection
SMP will only bring you so far - i'll bet 8 VCPU VMs on Atoms will be beat by a 2 VCPU VM on a Core 2 Duo.
Perhaps not, depending on the other load the system is working on. Because of the way VCPUs are scheduled (at least in VMWare) that 8-vCPU VM won't get a time-slice until such time as there are 8 real cores available for the duration of that slice. If your task is CPU intensive and can be easily separated into distinct tasks not overly chatty (i.e. cross VM latency is not going to be a major issue) and the host has gobs of RAM available, you are often better off having several VMs with one cVPU each than one VM with several vCPUs. This may be much less of a problem on a many-CPU monster like the 512 core unit being discussed than it is on 2/4/8-core boxes, but I expect the balance to still be in favour of multiple single-vCPU VMs in cases where the task can be efficiently split between them.
check your facts - the atom Z530 which they use does have VT-x. and people did virtualize before that , you know.