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How Google Spawned The 384-Chip Server
- a9 15y agoSo all those folks who always say "memory is cheap" and who make fun of others who write small conservative programs might not be so smart after all. Because they can't run their "feature-rich" unconstrained applications on wimpy nodes. And thus they can't cut their employer's energy and real estate costs. Why did Google abandon its plans to supply its own energy?
- nknight 15y ago> So all those folks who always say "memory is cheap" and who make fun of others who write small conservative programs might not be so smart after all. Your first hint that an opinion comes from a neophyte is that they make fun of others. Your second hint is that they have an un-nuanced worldview. > Why did Google abandon its plans to supply its own energy? They didn't. They shut down part of their alternative energy R&D efforts, then turned around and dumped about $100 million into new solar projects. And they've never stopped putting PV panels on their datacenters. Mass media somehow misinterpreted this as an abandonment of some grand strategy by Google.
- brandon 15y agoToday, Mozilla is using SeaMicro’s older 512-core machines to handle downloads of its Firefox browser Can anyone comment on the accuracy of this? "Handling downloads" is pretty vague, but still it seems like a pretty braindead job, and I know Mozilla is leveraging lots of mirrors and probably CDNs for this.
- wmf 15y ago"Today, when an end user running Firefox wants to download an update, addon or persona, the browser sends a URL request to Mozilla’s download cluster. The servers running Linux, Apache, and PHP run a query to the backend database/memcache cluster and return an HTTP Redirect URL (also called an HTTP 302 return) back to the browser so that Firefox can fetch the desired file from the network of donated download resources." http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy.pdf http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy...
- Retric 15y agoLet me get this strait, it's basically (request)>(redirect) for a few MB's of data. That seems like the kind of thing where a single CPU could handle ~100,000 requests per second. I know the Firefox team is not exactly well know for writing fast code, but there must be more to it than that.
- th0ma5 15y agoThis could be journalistic laziness and muddling of facts, but there is also something to be said for understanding the sub-millisecond performance considerations of a large professional effort, which may need an assured throughput even with known possible failures, and instantaneous hand off of each packet in as near real time as tuned with other devices, so as to not gum up the works subtly both down and up stream.
- moe 15y agoand instantaneous hand off of each packet in as near real time as tuned with other devices, so as to not gum up the works subtly both down and up stream. Wow. You make static HTTP-downloads sound like rocket science. Honestly, this is as trivial as it gets in terms of scaling. No "512 core machine" needed whatsoever, unless they've started to fold proteins along with their downloads...
- Drbble 15y agoNote that semiconductor sells Atom cards which are about 10% of a Xeon core in power and energy. So 512 core isn't 43 2x6core Mac Pros, it is more like 4.
- hga 15y agoNote, as of yet due to its dependency on Intel's Atom line SeaMicro on only can't offer much memory per chip but they also can't offer parity or ECC, which is a much bigger deal killer for me.
- icefox 15y agoAnyone else find it odd that seamicro.com doesn't give you any way to actually buy their product?
- Someone 15y agoNot really. This product is aimed at large enterprises. The more or less expected behavior is: - you call them, fill in a form, or meet them at an expo. - their sales team contacts you to discuss whether you can 'help each other'/'find a win-win scenario'. I have heard that second step described as "they figure out how much they can charge you for their product" In some sense, this is the epitome of "do not price your stuff at what it costs, price it at what it is worth".
- fierarul 15y agoKinda like asking $1000 for a glass of water from the man almost dying of thirst but accepting $3 from the man that's jogging and wants a sip. The problem is I've always seen explanations where pricing is set my the market demand. I'm curious how an economical model would look when there is no market, just this sort of individual negotiations with zero transparency. Edit: This reminds me of the "how much is your time worth" sales question. Imagine how much a billionaire pays his maid.
- kijin 15y agoAs soon as another vendor tries to negotiate with you, there will be a market. Just because it's less convenient for the casual shopper doesn't mean that it's not a market.
- fierarul 15y agoWhat if they are selling an unique product and there is no other vendor? Is there a market when the same product is negotiated at a different price with each customer?
- 7952 15y ago
- Roboprog 15y agoIs nothing: in Soviet Russia, 384 servers chip YOU! (I am so gonna get dinged, now :-))
- Roboprog 15y agoSeriously, though, they might need to look at getting chip manufacturers to up the low-power-core count on each chip to make these packages fit together more efficiently.
- mjwalshe 15y ago384 isn't that much you can easily get 500+ full fat cores in a full cab for HPC systems and that is leaving 2U for the infiband tor switch
- jacques_chester 15y agoMy favourite in this field was SiCortex, who were killed by a cashflow interruption at the start of the GFC.