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Mega Linux Boxes, and Cheap Ones Too
Couple of interesting developments in Linux hardware lately.
The Linux Store is
selling super cheap linux boxes.
news.com has a story
about them where they proclaim that they will only be advertising
on sites like Slashdot and Freshmeat except that
Scoop doesn't even had ads, and I'd
never heard of them before reading that article. An
actual advertiser (Penguin Computing), however now has a 8 CPU Xeon Box
that runs Linux (of course). First 8 CPU box I've seen running
Linux (which I didn't even know could do 8 way SMP. Although
I've been told of 32 and 64 chip linux boxes in development
by other companies. No I can't name names).
Yes, he is. He said so. Or weren't you at last year's Linux Expo? :)
No, the big draw to Linux is that it'll run on fscking anything.
The real limit is simply that the Linux kernel's locking isn't granular enough. From listening to the discussions on the kernel list, the basic limitations seem to be in the filesystem and SCSI device drivers (you don't try doing a machine like this with IDE drives!). Theodore T'so popped up a while back saying he was going to work on making the filesystem work better w/SMP, but that was the last we heard of him (presumably he has discovered that it's harder than he thought!).
Anyhow: The VA Research machine is apparently, from reading their press releases, a machine that was developed by a Japanese manufacturer in conjunction with Intel (was it Hitachi?). I suspect that the Penguin machine is the exact same machine, just as the rest of their "big" servers are the exact same machines that VA Research sells (heck, the exact same machines that Linux Hardware Solutions sells as our dual processor Xeon workstation and quad processor Xeon servers, except that for our top-of the-line quad server we use the AMI platform rather than the Intel one, and we deck them out a bit differently as far as network card and RAID card). I haven't the foggiest clue who has been putting LSD into Sam's drinking water lately with these hallucinogenic press releases we've been seeing, but I must admit that I get a bit of a laugh out of them. Maybe he's doing like UserFriendly etc. and stringing the April Fools jokes out?
Eric.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Today, thanks to the mass market in commodity components created by the IBM PC platform (see The Commoditization of Computers), any Joe Consultant in Hoboken, Michigan can put together his own computers that are every bit as high in quality and low in price as those from Dell. It's an amazing democratization of the computer industry, totally unlike anything that has ever happened in any other industry. Suddenly any schmuck off the street can build a computer just as good as what he can buy, often for less!
Given all that, folks like VA Research, Penguin, or Linux Hardware Solutions would have to be nuts to design their own motherboards. People don't buy our hardware because it is somehow better than what Joe Schmuck can put together in his back room with an issue of Computer Shopper in hand. People buy our hardware because we are *LINUX* people. We know Linux. We can choose the best hardware for Linux out of that vast array of commodity hardware just sitting on the shelf for the picking. We can configure Linux to best work on this hardware (and for the guy who says Red Hat 5.2 won't work with the 2.2 kernel, every single one of our SMP machines ships with the 2.2 kernel, and probably 90% of those are Red Hat 5.2). We can set up the automounter so that people don't have to mount and dismount floppies and CD-ROMs. We can install "X-CDRoast" when people buy a CD-R from us.
When every Joe Schmuck can put together a box that's every bit as good as what he could buy from Dell, Gateway, or LHS, we're no longer in a business where engineering is the difference. Rather, the difference is going to be service and quality of components. Fundamentally speaking, folks like VA Research, LHS, and Penguin sell the service of pulling together Linux-compatible components and installing Linux on the resulting computers. How well we do this is what detirmines our success or failure -- not how many components we manufacture ourselves.
Note: I'm talking about the "mainstream" market, between $1,000 and $30,000 in price... past $30,000, we're talking about engineering making a difference again, and below $1,000, you need massive quantities that Joe Schmuck can't do in his back room. Still, you get the point, right?
--Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
For your typical PC he is right. PCs do not have the memory bandwidth, or any of the other things that make that statement untrue for the big machines like Sun or Sgi makes.
VAResearch had the first 8 way xeon back in March. There's a picture of VAResearch's founder standing next to it at LinuxExpo, but like every other product, if you don't market it, it might as well not exist.
Think, before you speak r00t d00d..
Heat fins on the case? Since when is the CASE a major source of heat? If you want to transfer heat from the hard drive and the CPU ONTO the case, how would you do it? Submerge it in water maybe... :)
CPU's in _general_ aren't the problem; x86 and is hugely innnefficent and generates higher-than-average levels of heat so it needs another fan atop the heat sink. My PowerPC does quite nicely without a CPU fan... the CPU is in my estimation the third source of heat after the hard drive and power supply.
As a result, this G3 is AMAZINGLY quiet. I suppose all fans could be disabled if I got an external hard drive (no thanks) or netbooting (not needed) and moved the power supply out, but I'm not willing to test it. If I wanted absolute quiet I'd get a G3 rackmount from Marathon Computers..
One thing that CAN help reduce noise is applying vibration dampening material to "safe" metal inside the computer, like portions of the frame and maybe the inside of the case cover (YMMV I wouldn't completely cover the case because more heat may build up).
You can get the stuff at a car-stereo shop..
My message got mangled somehow - probably because I was trying to post from the NetPositive browser on the BeOS. NP doesn't seem to like the posting mechanism. Anyway, my point was that it was a dual-processor capable system with just one processor, and that fact was not clearly explained. Sleazy.
However, I have a question to IntlHarvester - what is it about IDE that makes it use up the CPU? I hear people bad-mouthing IDE all the time, but it's worked fine on my Mac G3, even for high-speed video captures. What's wrong with IDE?
D
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It makes me a little worried about making a mail order purchase when, even with a high-rated company that's very good at satsifying customers, you have 27 people returning merchandise out of 63 total respondants (see Transcend Technologies ratings).
Just wondering. Incidentally, I don't mean to pick on Transcend - pretty much all the highly-rated companies have similar stories to tell.
D
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I thought multi-proc + IDE was a bad idea. Plus why buy an extra CPU when you're burning the cycles you do got with IDE?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
What is asynchronous IO? What specifically does it relate to?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan