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There are a few problems with dual sockets: - The flip side of cuts the computers you need to work with in half is that it doubles the blast radius in case of
by drewg123 5y ago
There are a few problems with dual sockets:
- The flip side of cuts the computers you need to work with in half is that it doubles the blast radius in case of PSU/fan/mobo/etc failure
- If you're interested in I/O, dual sockets can be problematic because few motherboards are "balanced" with an equal number of PCIe slots local to each socket.
- NUMA makes everything harder. Even after the work that I've done to make NUMA useful for Netflix's Open Connect (CDN) on FreeBSD, I'd very much rather just use flat machines wherever I can. NUMA gives lots of opportunities for comically bad performance if any little thing is placed incorrectly.
- dragontamer 5y agoI do appreciate the difficulty of getting software configured correctly. But I'm of the opinion that software configuration is quicker and easier than redeveloping algorithms to become faster on FPGAs or GPUs. Its really odd to have a talk about how FPGAs are part of a hypothetical mainstream future (when so few people even know how to code in Verilog, let alone know how to synthesize a systolic array or other obscure parallel architecture). And then turn around and say that Dual-Socket computers are too hard to configure. Verilog / FPGAs aren't magic. They're just highly configurable logic gates + some preconfigured ALUs that allow for alternative parallel structures. These alternative parallel structures (most commonly a systolic array) are often highly specific to a task. But ultimately: the mode of compute still needs to be super-parallel to beat a CPU. Remember: CPUs have higher clock-speeds than FPGAs. That's why FPGAs have mini-ALUs inside of them (ex: multipliers), because ASIC beats configurable logic in every spec that matters (GHz, power-efficiency, mm^2 on die).