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Perspectives on SeaMicro's Innovative Intel Atom Server
- IgorPartola 16y agoMy #1 question in this case is how do the various virtualization technologies scale out. I suspect they don't very well, but if they did, this obviously would be a huge win.
- hga 16y agoCould you be more specific in what you mean by "the various virtualization technologies"; e.g. are you referring to the ASICs?
- whimsy 16y agoCould also be referring to things like Xen, I suppose
- IgorPartola 16y agoI was talking about Xen, OpenVZ and the like. I've been recently exposed to the market of VPS hosting and I wonder how much lower can the prices be driven with this type of technology.
- hga 16y agoYes, that's an interesting question, although I wonder what you precisely mean by "scale out". E.g. one thing that comes to mind is management, although it's pretty clear that VPS hosting providers have means of dealing with many many Xen instances. With 2 GB max per core, space will be at a premium, the smallest practical Dom0 will be desired (I use Xen as an example because it the one I'm familiar with). VM load balancing will likely be required for good service, and the interconnect fabric ought to make that pretty cheap. Compared to AWS, this particular SeaMicro solution will only provide something like a Small Instance which has 1.7 GB, the next step up is 7.5 GB. This could prove interesting, I'm sure there are plenty of VPS niches it will service well, if the no ECC issue is not a customer service showstopper as others have wondered on the main HN SeaMicro thread.
- IgorPartola 16y agoThanks for the detailed response. I mean "scale out" in the sense that the linked post means it: scaling from one giant CPU to a few smaller ones. Yes there certainly are many niches: from small e-mail relays to DNS servers, there are plenty of applications where the RAM/storage requirements are low and most of the time the box would be IO bound waiting on a network resource.
- hga 16y agoMost important bit of insight in this article: no ECC (Atoms are consumer CPUs and as far as I can tell Intel is very rigorous about limiting ECC to official server chips). ADDED: in his reference post (http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedECCMemory.aspx http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedE...) he says "All AMD processors whether server, embedded, or client have ECC. All ARMs have ECC." and makes some other very interesting comments,
- Tamerlin 16y agoThat does limit the applicability of the Atom-based cluster to things like web applications. It would do nicely for running a memcached cluster, as well, as long as the interconnect latency is low enough.
- hga 16y agoHow much CPU does memcached use? I.e. is this 1.6GHz Atom with 2GB of memory a good match; it's got 1TB for a fully populated $139K box,
- Andys 16y agoSomeone needs to make a dedicated hardware key-value store which would use way less power than even this dense atom box. If you have $10M spare, contact me ;)
- Tamerlin 16y agoIt doesn't consume all that much CPU, though it is possible to saturate it. The trick is to take advantage of the smooth scaling model: you an add memcached nodes until you run out of nodes. The clients have a list of nodes as part of their configuration, and the client runs the hashing function, which includes mapping the entry into the proper node. So the only real overhead that each node has to deal with is serialization. It's very simple, so it works very well. :)