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HP Launches Moonshot
New submitter linatux writes "HP has announced their 'Moonshot 1500 server' — up to 1,800 servers per 47U rack are supported. The tech certainly seems to be an advance on what is currently available — will it be enough to revive HP's server fleet?"
From Phoronix: "Moonshot began with Calxeda-based ARM SoCs, but in the end HP settled for Intel Atom processors. Released today were HP's Moonshot system based on the Intel Atom S1200. Hewlett-Packard claims that their Moonshot System uses 89% less energy, 80% less space, 77% less cost, and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
65% less per core
" ...89% less energy, 80% less space, 77% less cost, and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Yet no mention of performance compared to that same "traditional" sever. I'm going to guess about 60-80% less.
Low power and massive amounts of parallel cores is alright, but does it compute? How do these low power servers benchmark against EC2 or equivalent? This article didn't talk benchmarks. Maybe you get all these gains in consumed power, cost, space etc... because it is 90% less powerful than competitors.
Build a man a fire and you warm him for a day. Set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life.
And we all know that datacenter servers are used only for running the front-end of 3D games. Oh no, this product must be DOOMED!
Sounds sweet!!
Atom processors are notoriously slow. You can't play 3d video games on them.
Yes, you can. :-)
I managed to play Orbiter on a reasonable resolution (1280x1024x16) and got an acceptable (barely, I admit) framerate on my Atom 330 box. That it's my Media Center and torrent server, by the way.
Granted, the Game of the Year will not run on this setup. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
HP tried this with Transmeta a while back, and produced blades that completely sucked - WAY too slow. Individual machines on blades are dead, unless you need HPC type power, and Atom ain't that. If you need to squeeze 1800 limp servers into a rack, VMWare and its children are already there.
Sorry HP, you suck. Go back to making shitty printers, and then get out of the way. Hopefully your corpse will provide the fertilizer for some new market leader to grow from.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/144778-atom-vs-cortex-a15-vs-krait-vs-tegra-3-which-mobile-cpu-is-the-most-power-efficient
Whenever slashdot asks "Will it be enough?" what do we say everybody? NO! We say N-O. No.
HP has been attracting fail like it's a government project with unlimited funding and no congressional oversight. I mean seriously, we may be breaking into new physics here with the strong attractive force that all things HP have to all things Fail. And no technology is going to fix that, because the ultimate source of the bogon radiation is (wait for it) HP senior management. They'll figure out a way to screw this up, trust me. They could have just discovered the Holy Grail and they'd still somehow figure a way to botch it so instead of getting eternal youth, we're stuck with an endless series of ever more-expensive drinking glasses that can only hold certain types of beverages and occasionally explode for no reason.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The Money Shot?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
1st gen atom netbook with GMA945 here, I can play most but the latest 3D games on it. I would probably better served with an A15, but it did not existed then, and serve me well today. Try Warzone 2100, really cool game. Crysis is a no touch, but im not in ghe demographic anyway. A while world exist outside your basement... just sayin'!
Tomorrow is another day...
Very sorry for the typos... grammar nazis please abstain.
Tomorrow is another day...
From the HP Site: "The HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis has 45 hot-pluggable servers installed and fits into 4.3U. The density comes in part from the low-energy, efficient processors. The innovative chassis design supports 45 servers, 2 network switches, and supporting components."
Each pluggable unit support 1x 2GHZ intel atom S1200 series cpus (2x core, 4x thread), up to 1 dimm @ 8gb, and one SFF sata drive. That gives you 90 cores/180 threads, 360GB's in 4.3u.
For comparison a 6RU cisco UCS chasis can put down up to 160 Cores / 320 threads, 4TB of memory. Those are high performance Xeon cores. Not sure on the $$$ per compute/memory between the two.
The really big question is are there enough use cases for that many "thin" servers. At 2 cores and 8GB of ram you are very thing by modern standards and there is 0 opportunity for vertical growth.
Would somebody please find the marketers/editors that wrote this and shoot them? THXBYE
Hi. I'm part of the engineering team tasked with tracking down and eliminating people upon request, who have managed to slight someone else on the internet. We've logged your request and will get to it as quickly as possible. However, due to our limited budget and the unexpected popularity of our service, the high volume of requests will delay our response time. We currently estimate that we'll be able to service your request on October 27th, 2238, at 8:00 pm.
Also, our records indicate that you have an appointment with us on June 27th, 2027, at 3:35pm. Please be prompt. The internet as you know it depends on it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
When did we start saying nitric oxide?
Marketing and marketers now represents about a third of our resources. I say we have a zombie infestation on our way!
So...former HP customer, or former employee?
I'm guessing you haven't actually used HP servers or compared them to the competition. In my experience they completely kick Dell's butt, and give IBM a real run for their money, at much lower cost. I evaluated a ProLiant Gen8 and the manageability features were pretty impressive. The thing can update it's firmware and send SNMP traps, etc, from bare metal, without an OS.
Granted, HP had some crappy CEOs, and on the low-end consumer stuff they race to the bottom with everyone else, but their servers are serious and arguably industry-leading. They also sell more PCs than anyone anywhere, unless you start counting every iPod touch as a "computer."
Lots of datacenter servers are mostly used for holding a connection open while it waits for the database to spit back a resultset. Hense products like these.
Really - do you even know anything about the HP server line? Are you aware that HP servers (ProLiant - from Compaq) outsell the next 5 competitors - combined? What exactly are you expecting to be "revived"?
Someone at Phoronix really needs to learn basic math. The Chassis is 4.3U and hold 45 of these Moonshot servers, so a 47U rack could fit 10 chassis' for a total of 450 servers.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
Or one of the ousted CEOs or board members? Hum, I could almost believe Leo was a girl in training.
seems like a few years old Seamicro http://www.seamicro.com
Nope. http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/8/2008/04/Melies_TripMoon_largest.jpg
Nazi is a proper noun and thus must be capitalized.
And yet you don't know how to spell "capitalised". Bloody colonials...
I dunno.
The HP P4000s SANs are pretty nice when compared with comparable equipment.
Of course, they got them by buying LeftHand.
But yeah, long gone are the days of the solid Laserjet 4250 days with millions of prints that made them worth refurbishing.
THL phish sticks
But in all seriousness, this is a great idea for crowd sourcing.
Acquire startup funding and open a website for sponsors and volunteers. You could run it on TOR and pay the volunteers via bitcoin.
Donations are weighted depending on the amount donated, people could vote for the target they most wanted addressed first. The balances could just continue to grow until a volunteer accepts the job. Of course it would have to be a COD service and some sort of clear proof would be required, but it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
You could probably even get corporate sponsorship.
thank you.
Tomorrow is another day...
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Show me all the ARM Cortex CPU's with hardware virtualization support and ECC memory controllers.
I'll absolutely second this - HP's servers kick ass, quite frankly. They've had a few pretty major problems in recent years (P400 and P800 array controllers were absolute pieces of shit from a reliability standpoint, and the P410 STILL doesn't work quite right with SATA drives, though it rocks with SAS disks), but overall the engineering that goes into HP servers puts them well ahead of their competition, from what I've experienced. I've used Dell, IBM, white box, and HP, on the scale of "hundreds to thousands" of each brand, stretching back 10+ years.
The HP's have been more reliable, more configurable, more robust (yes, this is different from reliable), more manageable, and FAR better supported. There's a reason companies pay a premium for HP hardware, and it's because it pays for itself many over during the life of the hardware.
There are companies and applications that don't need that kind of reliability and run on shoddy white-box hardware... think Google, Facebook, etc. There are others, particularly stateful services like telephony and conferencing, that depend on reliable hardware. For those like that, servers like what HP provides will always be in demand. So long as HP maintains their focus on engineering in the server space, they won't be going anywhere soon.
Come one, I call shenanigans on this one. Seriously, a site where the majority of the submissions seem to take at least a day or more to propagate to actually being posted has a post about a random new HP product where the only really informative link is to what basically amounts to a press release hosted on their own site?
I understand things are tough all over and you gotta make money to survive, but do they really think their readers are that stupid?
Nazi is a proper noun and thus must be capitalized.
Certainly. But attributive words preceding a proper noun are also capitalized. So it is "Grammar Nazi," not "grammar Nazi."
"Moonshot" refers to their business strategy. This is a 'moonshot', high-risk, high-reward, but more than likely to just go into the crapper like pretty much everything except their calculators and printers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I think SOC for data centers makes a lot of sense.
Microcontroller and SOC tech is still catching up to current CPUs, but they have a major advantage of cramming just about everything on the mobo into the chip.
In a decade or so we may well be looking at today's data centers the way we currently look at ENIAC.
more robust (yes, this is different from reliable)
What is the difference between robust and reliable?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
subject says it
nazi's.
Have fun.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Considering the fact that only a small percentage of even IT people understand just how much server horsepower is required for many typical tasks that environments require of them, I don't expect a huge demand for these Moonshot servers. The specs however are very well suited for many applications used in small to medium sized businesses. And when you get to those who would see appropriate use for these, the price of the chassis is very ugly.
But in all seriousness, this is a great idea for crowd sourcing.
It was a joke... the idea of someone taking it seriously is rather chilling. That it's been up-modded doubly-so.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yeah, especially since he said shoot them. Not kill them.
Think nerf or water guns. The shooters might still get in trouble with the law, though probably not as big trouble.
But imagine if every day some random person shot you or your car or house with a nerf gun.
if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.
a third?
maybe we need to construct an Ark?
Is this 330 coupled with an NVidia ION? Because, I have a Atom 330 with Ion chipset and an Atom 525 with the integrated Intel graphics. The 330 is much snappier as a desktop system than the 525, even though it should be less quick. Personally, I think the low-voltage low-end Celerons are a much better deal than anything Atom and I've been an Atom fan for a long time.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Well the Cortex A15 has both.
Yeah, HP servers weren't bad after they bought Compaq and pretty much abandoned the old line of HP servers.
Learn to love Alaska
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
I had pretty much the same thought.
Drastically increasing the number of servers does not sound like a way to drastically decrease complexity. If this really does simplify things, I'd like to know how.
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
"Now with 67.3% more dubious numbers than traditional advertising copy!"
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Yeah, HP servers weren't bad after they bought Compaq and pretty much abandoned the old line of HP servers.
Hey! That's enough of that give-credit-where-credit-is-due crap. This is HP's spotlight. After all, they paid for it.
The OED prefers "capitalize" with a variant spelling of "capitalise". Bloody whipper snappers...
"Hi, yeah, could I get a number 2 with a coke? Oh, and large fries. And can you reduce the complexity on that? By how much? I don't know, 100%? Oh, you can only do 97? Ok fine, I'll take that. Oh, and a chocolate shake."
Nops, it's a standard Intel motherboard with a I8294G graphic chipset. Barely acceptable, but it does the job. And, as you said, as a desktop machine it's a pain in the mouse's ass.
I had a harsh time, however, until I manage to install and configure the correct drivers and codecs. Win7, as it's installed, does a shitty job on the Atom 330. You need to use the Intel network driver (and turn off all hardware aid!), and do not forget to install the Atom 330 optimized codecs - otherwise you will not be able to see 1080i video.
I also installed a Soundblaster 5.1 PCI soundcard, with the correct drivers.
And that's all.
The machine is running almost 24x7 for 2 years and something, and I have no (many) regrets. My power bill lowered enough to spend some money on yet another 4T of storage for multimedia with the savings not much time ago.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
robust = when it breaks, it can be fixed more easily
reliable = doesn't break as often
it's gonna break either way
I'm pretty sure a 3U quad-Opteron setup will outrun a 47U rack full of Atoms, and with a much smaller I/O headache.
Virtual desktop
They break in predictable ways. All equipment will have failures. Do you want to spend the time swapping power supplies and hard drives that tell you when they have failed, or figuring out what the fuck is the matter with this broken box?
A good example is something I've experienced multiple times. A hard drive in an array fails hard. In a Proliant, you get a red light and the machine keeps running. In a Dell or IBM, it takes down the whole disk bus and you have to take time pulling individual drives and reenabling the array until you figure out which drive is the bad one.
Well your country doesn't know how to spell tire, so I suppose that makes us even. :)
its called Xen, KVM, and VMware (to name 3) virtuoso, parallels, vbox, and vps to name 4 more and they all works very well and each "server" can be scaled to what it needs and others scaled down to what there minimum requirements are. The idea of having a single virtual machine on a virtualized micro kernel isn't necessarily a bad one, its good for isolation for secure servers. But these seem way too under powered and do they support server virtualization, my guess is NO they do not. More over with the invention of thread virtualization the need to split up the servers into separate servers is diminished by several factors, since it will probably be a long time before anything can escape from thread virtualization. Thread virtualization will become a huge hit in the next few years I am guessing, but this wont. What is a Virtual Machine?
And we all know that datacenter servers are used only for running the front-end of 3D games. Oh no, this product must be DOOMED!
Alternatively, it could be also QUAKEd.
Ezekiel 23:20
Shut up.
The one potential spoiler for SoCs is virtualization.
Sure, the motherboard of your generic dual xeon/opteron box looks a bit untidy(and I suspect that we'll see further integration here, and already have seen some, goodbye discrete northbridge...); but if you divide the number of wasteful little discrete packages across the number of VMs the machine is running, it starts to look a whole lot better.
This isn't a 'bah, integration, it'll never happen!', it has been happening fairly steadily in PCs more or less since IBM defined them and Compaq produced a non-copyright-infringing competitor. Discrete option cards gradually get eaten by motherboards, and once it's an expected motherboard feature, the Northbridge or Southbridge usually engulfs it. More recently, most of the northbridge has been eaten by the CPU. Full SoC-level integration seems unlikely for the moment because PoP RAM severely limits CPU thermal envelope and total system RAM, and because certain specs still vary enough by use case that it isn't economic to go one-size-fits all; but integration proceeds apace elsewhere.
True. In the case of web severs serving static files, the CPU sits around waiting for the hard drive to send a file to the network card. Partly because CPU speeds have increased by 40X while hard drive speeds have only doubled, for many workloads the CPU isn't the limiting factor and an Atom would work just fine.
A shoe uses 100% less power too. Does not mean it makes a useful server.
When I read the article I was harkened back to my days working with an IBM 390 mainframe. Massively parallel blah blah. It seems the pendulum does swing back periodically....
Well, of course they can do more, but how much more? A lot of the OS and application software that runs in my server cabinets is licensed per processor. Seems that the Atom would be a bad fit in that particular scenario.
Referring to Orbiter as a 3D Game (especially at 1280x1024x16) is like going to Maxim's and bringing your own happy meal. Call me when you can play Bioshock Infinite on, at least, medium at no less than 30fps in HD resolutions.
Not true.
Server loads are either CPU bound, Disk bound, or Network bound.
If you're doing CDN, the disk is meaningless and you're limited entirely by the weak-ass CPU in the server. You can put 300 of these in the same power envelope that you can put 4 dual-quad-core systems. (eg 32 CPU cores.) That's increase in cpu density of only about 10, but at a reduction in performance (E1200 is about a 700 passmark score(350 per core), while the dual Xeon E5 quadcore of the same speed has a score closer to 6000. So the passmark rating per core for the E5 is 750.) So once the power in watts being wasted vs initial investment is evaluated, nobody would ever buy the Atom parts for a server except where it's guaranteed that the systems will be mostly underutilized. An idle E5 may waste 135 watts, where as an idle Atom wastes 6.
If you're doing web-serving, most of these Atom parts are sufficient, and far superior to ALL VPS's being sold by the likes of dreamhost and amazon EC2.
But Atom parts are completely wrong parts for file servers, database servers, and
And even their printers are crap now days.
There must be balance in the force, young padawan.
If either side gains, then the retaliation swings the line of power back and forth like a pendulum.
And before you know it there's a clone war, brothers kissing sisters and lil furry creatures saving the galaxy with rocks.
We must hold the line firm!
Am I the only one that noticed that this processor is not 2008 deriverived, rather a brand new 22nm based one?
all of these "hot and loud" comments are getting on my nerves, and Im an AMD fan.
Show me an Atom CPU that has that as well
not really, a mainframe of S390 era had very few cores. mainframe architecture isn't about a bunch of systems network connected all running separate OS instances. It's instead a "star architecture" of processors connected to "peripheral processing units" to offload IO work.
... only a decade later.
It worked for silk road....
great, now we got ebay for hitmen
in a lot of cases the packages are zipped (apart from compiling, caching, etc.) before they are send, which costs CPU and RAM
They're talking about the number of network cables and power cables.
i don't know anything about server rooms, but this is cool considering how fickle consumers are: .. thank you HP : )
one day you have like zero (or one) visitor to your site and tomorrow maybe a thousand and then maybe again nothing.
i'd rather have something that can "spin down" if not needed but push when it's needed.
a xeon can only spin down so much.
and it looks "sexy": pull out and place in from top ha?
my hp mini (via cpu) is still working
side note: the hardware coming out is really awesome, but what OS (has drivers) is actually supposed to run it anyways? or
exists there someplace a TOP-SECRET operating system mere mortals don't know about that will get thrown
on to this new machines?
Heavens for Betsy, did you start a sentence with the word "and"? What is that sound? English teachers attempting suicide with a large ice picks in their eyes.
You need to support such accusations, but you can't.
There are members of a lot of civil rights groups that have worked with Ron Paul, have high praise for him. There are no examples of him making racist remarks, behaving in a racist way.
Ron Paul is a very honest man, far beyond his fellow politicians. Again, you can't support your claims.
When you're talking about 6watt CPU's packed together as close as possible, I think PoP RAM makes perfect sense.
Just think how much space is wasted by RAM sockets PCB traces and how much power is wasted driving high frequency data lines between chips.
Is it 64 bit?
I ran Linux on mine. I guess Windows would be better, as the Intel drivers for Atom aren't open source. With the ION it was just fine, due to the (closed source) NVidea drivers. They served me well, but due to space issues, I had to fall back on having all my gear in a backpack. The two Atom machines are now somewhere in a closet at my parents. I'll surely find a use for them someday...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I haven't seen an individual disk take down a Dell or even whitebox disk array (or the handful of IBM ones I've used since then) since they went to SAS back around 2005-6.
The Dell ones, and the better whitebox models, give you a flashing light showing which drive is bad. Anything with enclosure services will also show you which drive is bad in software, if you have a decent RAID card or a decent smart array (and cost and performance-wise, it's almost always better to get a JBOD and a smart card than to get the controller in the array.)
Who said anything about Hadoop? These guys pack enough punch to do some serious computing, who cares about disk.
We have dedicated platforms for handling our storage tiers, anyway. This is obviously not their purpose.
Is it 64 bit?
Internally yes, with some instructions processing 128-bits. The address buss is 40-bits wide, limiting? physical memory to 1TB
Certainly, for very low power processors, PoP makes sense(at least until you hit the ceiling on how much RAM you can actually fit on top of a very low power processor, the 8GB SODIMMs in these little HP boxes generally have 16 little BGAs, all not significantly smaller than the CPU itself, on the card). My question is whether, given how easy it is to slice a larger CPU into smaller virtual CPUs, the 'lots and lots of teeny CPUs' architectural strategy is actually a good one, or just a good one until it finally scares Intel into not overpricing Xeons, especially the ULV ones.
robust - can drop it and it still works.
reliable - stick it in a corner and ignore it. It will continue to work and work and work.
That's like saying the Atom is 128bit, because it has 128bit SSE registers.
The Cortex A15 is an ARMv7. All registers are 32bit, apart from the SIMD NEON ones which are 128bit. Sort of like the 128bit registers in SSE.
It's a 32bit core with a 32bit memory bus and a single 32bit 800mhz memory interface.
ARMv8 is 64bit. It has 64bit registers
That's the Cortex A53 and A57.
Why didn't you just say "The Cortex A57" instead of spinning lies about the A15?
It's a lot easier to slice up a large CPU in to several smaller virtual CPU's than it is to use several smaller CPU's to emulate a large CPU.
In my experience they completely kick Dell's butt, and give IBM a real run for their money, at much lower cost. I evaluated a ProLiant Gen8 and the manageability features were pretty impressive. The thing can update it's [sic] firmware and send SNMP traps, etc, from bare metal, without an OS.
Those have been fairly standard service processor features, actually, for a number of years. The SNMP trap thing is slightly annoying, in that everyone seems to assume that some application that can handle traps is available. The latest iLO 4 firmware introduces the ability to syslog (which is somewhat broken still - and something Sun did years ago) and send email (also done by Sun years ago). Unlike IBM and Dell and Cisco's UCS servers, HP Gen 8 systems with iLO 4 >1.05 have serial consoles that work right out of the box for bootstrapping (also done by Sun years ago). iLO also has the ability to mount an ISO image over the net via an HTTP URL, which is quite handy at times. The HP Gen 8 systems (with iLO 4) really are a distinct step above the G7 systems in a number of ways, eg. PXE booting doesn't inexplicably force the console to 115200 bps, lack of the bizarre MCE issues that some G7 systems had, much better iLO, etc. Mid 2012 they finally came out with 25SFF / 10SFF chassis so that a decent number of internal disks can be provisioned, with SAS expanders embedded in the backplane. And most notably, at one point I complained to HP about their Smart Array HBA's not being able to do 3-way mirroring. I dunno for sure if they took my RFE personally, but the Gen 8 series of HBA's actually has that ability, something valuable I had not seen on products from Adaptec and LSI.
Granted, HP had some crappy CEOs, and on the low-end consumer stuff they race to the bottom with everyone else, but their servers are serious and arguably industry-leading.
Given the current product line, sure -- but the G5 / G6 / G7 systems had their share of suckage, including iLO systems that were painfully underpowered and sluggish. I demo'd a G5 system at one point and was incredulous that the PCI riser was attached to the chassis lid, such that opening the lid entailed ripping cards out of their slots. I think G5 and earlier systems also didn't come with the serial console working out of the box, which was a non-starter. HP, Dell, and IBM systems still share a bit of anachronistic suckage: the serial console is a DB9, straight out of 1990. Sun's systems have used RJ45 connectors for *years*. HP refuses to even include or even spec an adapter for their DB9 consoles -- we had to try a bunch of different models to see what worked, then I bought 50 of the things.
The additional complexity of a traditional server is now transferred into software. They probably compared to something like a component count of a full-sized server cluster or a system with equal number of cores.