Interviews: Ask Technologist Kevin Kelly About Everything

Kevin Kelly has for decades been involved in some of the most interesting projects I know about, and in his roles as founding editor (and now editor at large) of Wired Magazine and editor of The Whole Earth Catalog has helped spread the word about many others. Kelly is probably as close to a Rennaisance man as it's possible to be in the 21st century, having more-than-passing interest and knowledge in a range of topics from genetic sequencing and other ways that we can use measurement in pursuit of improved health to how technology is used and reused in real life. Among other projects, he's also the founder of CoolTools, which I consider to be (unsurprisingly) the closest current equivalent to the old Whole Earth Catalogs. (Disclaimer: I've had a few reviews published there, too.) (He's also one of the founders of The WELL, now part of Salon.) Kelly is also Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Long Now Foundation, the group which for years has been designing a clock to ring on 10,000 years in the future. Below, ask questions of Kelly, bearing in mind please the Slashdot interview guidelines: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment. He'll get back soon with his answers.

Comments

difficultiesd

[bbk]

the SeaMicro servers handled the load with no difficultiesd

Hmm... now there's a daemon you really don't want to see running...

We talk about this need a lot at work.

[toonces33]

We have quite a few machines in the server room, and we have constant problems keeping the room cool. But ultimately many of the boxes really don't need that much CPU power - they have a fairly simple job that they need to do. We have speculated about using an old laptop on AC power for some of the jobs that don't require a lot of CPU and don't require a lot of disk space.

These servers sound like they would work quite a bit better for this purpose however..

Re:We talk about this need a lot at work.

[dave420]

They are hardly servers. Not even close.

512 Atoms in 10U

[serviscope_minor]

512 atoms in 10U doesn't compare that favourable to 480 opteron cores in 10U (standard 1U, 4 socket 6100s). The atoms draw (apparently) 2.5Kw. That sounds a little low: that's about 4W each. That's plausible for just the chips themselves, but what about the RAM, etc?

By contrast, the opterons will have a 1kW PSU each for a maximum power draw of less than 10kW, which is 4x as much.

So, is a 2.3GHz opteron core 4x faster than whatever atom cores they use? Quite probably. Though they might use dual core atoms, in which case there are 1024 cores which swings it in favour of the atoms again.

Basically, the article is far too light on details.

But as always, vast arrays of weak processors is likely to be popular in some applications and be massively overhyped in others.

The atom isn't an especially efficient CPU. It's low power for x86, but the high end processors have to be very efficient to fit within the thermal envelope.

Re:512 Atoms in 10U

[wagnerrp]

They're using 256 dual core Atoms, for 512 cores at 1.6Ghz. Those 2.3Ghz Opterons will do roughly twice the work per core as the Atoms, with eight cores per chip, four chips per box, a 1U box will replace roughly 32 Atoms, requiring 8U to achieve the raw power of the 10U SeaMicro box. Those 32 processors run 80W ACP each, so including memory, disk, and chipset, you're looking at 3-4kW under load, versus 2-2.5kW for the SeaMicro.

So how much will this thing cost you? The CPUs are $500 apiece. $300 for a 1U case. $800 for a board. $60 for a 4GB stick of registered ECC DDR3, times eight per processor. $275 for four 120GB SSDs. You end up around $6K per box. Now the SeaMicro uses Infiniband for its internal networking, for communication intensive tasks. Lets do the same. $900 each for dual port 40Gbps cards, and another $6K on a 36-port QLogic switch.

That adds up to just over $61K, versus $150K for the SeaMicro box of roughly equivalent performance. For nearly three times the cost, you get maybe a third lower power consumption. At worst you have double the power consumption, an extra 2kW, and say one more for the AC. That's 30 YEARS before you make up the difference in initial cost. Therein lies the problem with SeaMicro claims. They compare power consumption against hardware two and three generations old, the servers that are going to be replaced. If you actually compare them against new hardware, they're pretty mediocre.

Re:hmmm

[rbrausse]

instead of the not production-ready salt silo hydroelectricity seems a more realistical solution - either as pumped-storage to balance the fluctuating production of photovoltaic/wind or run-of-the-river as 24/7 supplier. the latter is the only source of energy for one quite big hosting company here in Germany

Re:Tilera and memory bandwidth?

[Medievalist]

Unfortunately, if you plan to run the Oracle JVM, yes [processor architecture] does matter. Only a few {operating system, architecture} tuples are supported. For example, no {openbsd, sparc}.

Thank you! Yet another good reason to avoid Oracle.

How Frequently Do You Kill or Leave a Project?

[eldavojohn]

It looks like you've been involved in many projects. I've got about 10 different side projects (outside of work) going on at any given time in several different realms. How often do you decide it's time to end a project so that you can focus on a better project? Have any projects that you devoted a lot of time to result in nothing or have all come to fruition in one way or another? What is your criteria for this?

Long now clock

[vlm]

What insights can you provide to the /. crowd about building the clock?
Project management anecdotes about the clock project?

Re:Proofreading...

[Jeng]

Neither are coherent topics.

Am I the only one that sees the blurb at the top is about asking some guy at Wired questions, yet all the comments are about low powered chips used in servers?

Re:Proofreading...

[Revotron]

It appears the comment stream got merged with the article that discussed Mozilla's use of SeaMicro servers. Oddly enough, the Mozilla article now has no comments...