13 ms·

My £60 ARM server

141 points by EwanToo 14y ago

akr 14y ago
I also use a small ARM server (SheevaPlug) since about two years and it can hold up easily to VPS hosting. It runs everything I would run on a "normal" server (Lighty, Dovecot-IMAP etc.), but needs nearly no power in comparison.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  The SheevaPlug is cool, but it seems like the newest ones have gone a slightly different route and thrown everything you could possibly want at it - wifi, bluetooth, audio, etc? That's all nice stuff, but just adds to the power and price for what should be a dirt cheap, almost disposable, piece of equipment. Though I would definitely appreciate gigabit ethernet on the beaglebone...
  - akr 14y ago
    I think so too - you normally don't need wifi etc. on such a device. The one I use is the original first one and I wouldn't use the newer ones. If I remember correctly they even need active cooling...
  - toyg 14y ago
    You can disable most of the extra stuff... I think all the options make these devices much more flexible. If you wanted a dirt-cheap, more modular component you'd be looking at Arduino or Raspberry Pi, not a plug.
  - sneak 14y ago
    The am3359 SoC on the BeagleBone supports (dual) gigE, but the PHY in use is 10/100 only.
psc 14y ago
Cool for a personal server, but there's one large downside—everything's soldered on. Upgrading a server like this isn't really possible. And what if something breaks? Unlike commodity hardware of the past, you can't just take the server out, fix the broken component, and stick it back. Before ARM servers take off, manufacturers will have to make components replaceable.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  I think as long as the price remains under $100, the manufacturers will consider the whole device a replaceable part on it's own. It'd be a bit like sending out a hard drive component for an engineer to replace, when the drive itself costs $100, it's just not worth the effort for 99% of installations.
  - psc 14y ago
    Perhaps, but for now, it's cheaper to make a data center out of traditional commodity hardware. Let's say that a hard drive (or whatever storage device) has a failure rate of 1% over 1 year. With traditional hardware, for every 100 computers you have, you'll replace 1 hard drive. A new hard drive will cost a fraction of the machine's initial price, let's say 1/5. So maintenance costs for storage devices are 1/500 the initial costs per year, maybe a bit more if you factor in the cost of the labor. Now if you make the same cluster of servers out of ARM hardware, let's say you'll need 4x the number of machines to get the same processing power. That's 400 machines. If the storage devices on these machines have the same failure rate, you'll need to replace 4 machines per year. However, since you're buying a new machine, you're don't get to pay for just the storage device. It costs you 4/400, or 1/100 the initial cost to maintain the storage devices for your ARM cluster per year. A huge assumption here is that both types of hardware have similar initial costs. So the point here is that it'll always be cheaper to compartmentalize your losses, unless ARM devices are much cheaper than traditional commodity hardware. Intuitively, throwing away a whole machine when something breaks is going to be a lot more expensive than just replacing the broken part. I don't imagine that it's extremely difficult to make parts replaceable on ARM boards, and it would definitely save some money, so I don't see why it shouldn't be done. (Also, I realize that the Beaglebone uses SD cards, which are cheap and replaceable. But imagine that instead of storage devices, I'd used memory for the example)
nico_h 14y ago
Anyone else blocked by the stupid cloudflare scam about not having 3rd party cookies enabled meaning you have virus on your computer? And preventing them from reading the article?
- EwanToo 14y ago
  I didn't know Cloudflare was that harsh, that's frustrating, sorry about that :(
  - nico_h 14y ago
    I had to read your fine post from the google cache, missing on the pretty pictures: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hUwlhkhc_pAJ:www.ewanleith.com/blog/956/my-60-arm-server+http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/956/my-60-arm-server&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hUwlhkh...
    - EwanToo 14y ago
      Hmm, I might need to disable cloudflare then, frustrating really as it's a clever service.
      - driverdan 14y ago
        Set the CloudFlare security level to low. I found anything above low results in too many false positives which ends up frustrating legit users like nico. I don't know why 3rd party cookies would matter though.
- jgrahamc 14y ago
  Huh? I browse constantly with third party cookies disabled in Safari and Chrome and never have a problem. I can see that site perfectly. And that's certainly not how CloudFlare decides that your machine is likely to be infected. What are you seeing when you visit the site?
  - 14y ago
lucian1900 14y ago
I plan to do a very similar thing with my Raspberry Pi.
- darkstalker 14y ago
  I want to replace my router with a Raspberry Pi, but seems impossible to buy one
  - eblackburn 14y ago
    Yeah. I've been on the waiting list for months :(
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    Just to make you feel bad, I've just been notified mine got shipped and I'll get it soon :) They are getting sent, just slowly.
seclorum 14y ago
I use my two Open Pandora's as build servers. They work just like any other PC in the house, with the difference that they can be easily unplugged and pocketed, as well. Fantastic little machines, and once you get a development environment up and running, they function extremely well.
Vizualni 14y ago
Excellent idea!
rwmj 14y ago
Personally I wouldn't trust a microSD card for any production role beyond being a bootloader. You'll be paged one day only to find you had to make a time-consuming visit to your co-lo, and that all your data was irretrievably gone. The solution to this is to have one "real" PC acting as a NAS and serving iSCSI. You would have to divide the extra cost of this PC across all the ARM servers you have.
- toyg 14y ago
  I run a Dreamplug pretty much 24/7, as my "homebrew" backup and NAS solution; the SD is used to boot and then mount an external RAID enclosure connected via eSATA, which holds the real data. Works quite well, in a fraction of the space that a "real" pc (or even a MacMini) would need.
  - AUmrysh 14y ago
    I love these Marvell plugs, my only gripe is that the community wiki is just spam now :( What site do you get your OS images from?
    - toyg 14y ago
      Usually from links on http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/ http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/
- nico_h 14y ago
  Micro SD are notoriously bad for server usage, they are designed to store infrequently changed files for a while, like mp3 collection, cameraphone snapshots, apps etc... Going with a brand name might help. In order to extend their lifespan, you might want to minimize the writes by disabling some logs and the "last access" updates on files (`noatime` for "no access times"). Some examples: http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/ http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-usi...
  - icebraining 14y ago
jk 14y ago
"Micro-SD card performance is highly variable, and generally rubbish" Agree with that. I use a pandaboard as a build server and I felt it is a lot efficient to use NFS than running off an SD card. Ewan, have you tried USB HDD instead of SD card?
- EwanToo 14y ago
  I think that's probably the next experiment, I'm not sure if I'd got for a HDD or a very small USB SSD to keep the power usage down - at the moment it's under 0.5W, a HDD will be several times that.
- rlpb 14y ago
  Pandaboards run much faster with USB hard drives instead of SD cards. That's what I hear from lots of knowledgeable people, anyway. I've not actually run any benchmarks though.
jarofgreen 14y ago
Interesting article but pls fix website for mobile readers http://twitpic.com/9o9q35 http://twitpic.com/9o9q35 I would have commented on your blog but on Firefox the "about me" floats over the disqus column so I can't.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  Ouch that's ugly isn't it? It's obviously not good enough. Will see about sorting it, thanks.
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  I've noticed most HN posts from blogs suffer this issue... I was thinking of a "Your Site Doesn't Work On Mobile" notification service...
  - jarofgreen 14y ago
    YES DO IT (I would help if I had spare time, I'll just wish you good luck instead)
runeks 14y ago
"[...] ARM servers are a big part of the future [...]" Has anyone actually compared x86 and ARM doing some sort of comparable task, and measured how much power they both consume performing the same task? I know ARM uses a lot less power than x86, but if it uses 10 times as little power but takes 20 times as long to do the same task as an x86 server chip, it still uses more power. I'm not saying it isn't more power efficient than x86 (it certainly has that potential, because of all the old cruft in x86), but I just haven't seen any evidence that supports this claim. Or am I missing the point? Is power efficiency not the main reason for ARM servers?
- timthorn 14y ago
  It all depends on the workload, but one public comparison (from the vendor and in a press release, but with some figures): http://www.low-latency.com/blog/cantor-evaluating-calxeda-arm-chips-10x-breakthrough http://www.low-latency.com/blog/cantor-evaluating-calxeda-ar...
- AUmrysh 14y ago
  The Ubuntu team was talking at SELF a few years back about using ARM clusters as web servers because of the low cost, high efficiency, and high core density you can achieve with the low-heat ARM chips.
- mbell 14y ago
  In many server applications your not CPU bound but rather IO bound. In those applications using the lowest power CPU makes sense. These are the applications ARM seems to be targeting first. Examples: $5 month static + php only website hosting market, front end load balancing, static file serving, etc. The other possible target is embarrassingly parallel work loads where you really just want to cram as many cores into a given space as possible. Usually the limit of how many cores you can put in a rack is either power or cooling, not space. Where you probably won't see ARM in the near term is on work loads that are highly single threaded and performance critical. I think this is exactly the type of situation your describing.
- sciurus 14y ago
  See Google's paper 'Brawny cores still beat wimpy cores, most of the time'. It concludes that 'Slower but energy efficient “wimpy” cores only win for general workloads if their single-core speed is reasonably close to that of mid-range “brawny” cores.' http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf HTML version at http://bit.ly/KOhENi http://bit.ly/KOhENi
rythie 14y ago
If it had a lot more memory that would be interesting. Though really you can get a 256Mb VPS for £5/month http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ and you don't have a setup charge or unreliable hardware.
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  I was thinking about this as well... maybe not in comparison to cheap providers whose performance are variable, but for £12/month from Linode you can get a 512mb VPS with 20GB of disk space. How does the performance of this ARM box compare to a Linode?
  - rythie 14y ago
    Well, for a ballpark figure: md5sum of 3.4 kernel.tar.gz (average of three runs) 512Mb Slicehost 2.2Ghz Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE = 0.275 seconds 512Mb BeagleBoard XM 1GHz Cortex A8 = 2.023 seconds
    - argus 14y ago
      where was the file stored on the beagle? that could explain a good part of the difference in results you're getting.
      - rythie 14y ago
        time dd if=linux-3.4.tar.bz2 of=/dev/null is 0.7 seconds on the beagleboard and slicehost is more variable but comes to down to 0.5 seconds after a few goes from (1 second). I'd expect it to be read from the page cache anyway. However, I remembered that the beagleboard is using busybox and really the systems are very different from each other, different distribution for example. Update: busybox md5sum is about 20% slower than regular md5sum.
- rwmj 14y ago
  ARM has strange limits on the amount of memory. The Versatile architecture supports up to 256 MB max. The Versatile Express architecture has a 2GB limit (and no PCI!) Then you have to remember that ARM is presently 32 bit, so you're going to have trouble going over 4 GB at all, which is currently a very small amount for a serious server. 64 bit ARM isn't going to be widely available for at least another 2 years, and at what cost we just don't know (but it's not likely to be £60/server).
nl 14y ago
There have been mentions on the OpenStack mailing list of various experiments NTT is doing with ARM servers. I don't think there is much information public about it yet though.
Maakuth 14y ago
I run a GuruPlug with filesystems on a LVM volume built from e-sata and usb hard drives. It's very fine for my personal needs, except the GP's crazy heat output. What I hope is that some manufacturer built ARM boards with loads of SATA controllers. That way one could build a very affordable large NAS's.
shirro 14y ago
If someone (looking at SanDisk) were to make a range of SD cards for servers and lightweight ARM desktops that would be of real interest. Because the current stuff out there for phones and cameras is of variable quality and is about the worst thing about these new lightweight arm systems.
pinkeye 14y ago
Checkout TonidoPlug2 (http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html). It has 512 MB DDR3 RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi b/g/n and in-built enclosure for SATA II HDD. You can boot it directly from the SATA instead of internal flash. All the right things you need in a personal server. Also it runs debian squeeze.
j_col 14y ago
Very cool, I've been wanting to do something similar with a personal server for some time.
darklajid 14y ago
Another site that is unreadable on a mobile device because the options to share the content are hiding the content itself. Is there any browser/browser & extension to remove that... stuff? Maybe an adblock filter, a greasemonkey script or something similar?
- EwanToo 14y ago
  Someone else pointed that out, it's not good is it? I've disabled the AddThis bar while I look into it (the caches might keep it alive for a while though), hopefully there's a suitable solution.
gizzlon 14y ago
On a related note, VIA makes small motherboards with embedded CPU's. They're not as cheap, but they act more like "real" pc hardware, are i386/686 compatible and use very little power. I've run a fan-less EPIA board at home for a couple of years, and it's nice. Took some time to find the right board though.. http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/ http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/
hmottestad 14y ago
HP has their Project Moonshot which is a rack server solution using multiple Calxeda ARM servers attached to a main board for power and networking. [HP] http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx [Engadget] http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/hp-and-calxedas-moonshot-arm-servers-will-bring-all-the-boys-to/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/hp-and-calxedas-moonshot-...
rbanffy 14y ago
I'd love to see a Aubrey Isle like processor based on ARM cores - with many ARM cores sharing a 2 GB pool of fast memory. The Intel cores on the Aubrey Isle chip are fairly large and take up most of the silicon on the die. An ARM-based design would be much smaller and cheaper to manufacture. Now that I said it, I wonder how much more expensive would be a RAM chip incorporating an ARM core versus pure memory. It would be interesting to have "smart memory" that could do things like "sha-384 this range and ping me back when you're done". Assuming other threads are not using that same component for other activities, it could be done basically "for free".
- mathnode 14y ago
  Best thing about ARM? It's cheap, so you can just pick and choose between distributed or shared memory models.
xxiao 14y ago
use Marvell's sheevaplug is better off for this. beaglebone is really for industrial control, beagleboard are for generic purpose while pandaboard is for mobile computing. SD cards are made for consumer class cameras, but you can buy industrial level SLC SD, for $50 per 4GB, in that case I will just go with SSD.
rmoriz 14y ago
I build a couple of ARM "servers" out of a PandaBoard (dual core + 1 GB RAM) and a self-made case (lasercutter) http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmoriz/sets/72157629535790241 http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmoriz/sets/72157629535790241 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:18645 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:18645 They're running Linaro, the Ubuntu-ARM-development-fork by ARM/Linaro.org
- videmsky 14y ago
  Whoa! It's like a micro-server and a makerbot mated. Nice!
  - rmoriz 14y ago
    I even made a cheesy video ;-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX61U_q6ksg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX61U_q6ksg Board: http://pandaboard.org/ http://pandaboard.org/ OS: http://www.linaro.org/ http://www.linaro.org/
videmsky 14y ago
Is anyone eyeing the new Atom for servers? Thinking about a bunch for a modest low power cluster. http://goo.gl/fWdwd http://goo.gl/fWdwd

141 points by EwanToo 14y ago

akr 14y ago

I also use a small ARM server (SheevaPlug) since about two years and it can hold up easily to VPS hosting. It runs everything I would run on a "normal" server (Lighty, Dovecot-IMAP etc.), but needs nearly no power in comparison.

EwanToo 14y ago
The SheevaPlug is cool, but it seems like the newest ones have gone a slightly different route and thrown everything you could possibly want at it - wifi, bluetooth, audio, etc? That's all nice stuff, but just adds to the power and price for what should be a dirt cheap, almost disposable, piece of equipment. Though I would definitely appreciate gigabit ethernet on the beaglebone...
- akr 14y ago
  I think so too - you normally don't need wifi etc. on such a device. The one I use is the original first one and I wouldn't use the newer ones. If I remember correctly they even need active cooling...
- toyg 14y ago
  You can disable most of the extra stuff... I think all the options make these devices much more flexible. If you wanted a dirt-cheap, more modular component you'd be looking at Arduino or Raspberry Pi, not a plug.
- sneak 14y ago
  The am3359 SoC on the BeagleBone supports (dual) gigE, but the PHY in use is 10/100 only.

psc 14y ago

Cool for a personal server, but there's one large downside—everything's soldered on. Upgrading a server like this isn't really possible. And what if something breaks? Unlike commodity hardware of the past, you can't just take the server out, fix the broken component, and stick it back. Before ARM servers take off, manufacturers will have to make components replaceable.

EwanToo 14y ago
I think as long as the price remains under $100, the manufacturers will consider the whole device a replaceable part on it's own. It'd be a bit like sending out a hard drive component for an engineer to replace, when the drive itself costs $100, it's just not worth the effort for 99% of installations.
- psc 14y ago
  Perhaps, but for now, it's cheaper to make a data center out of traditional commodity hardware. Let's say that a hard drive (or whatever storage device) has a failure rate of 1% over 1 year. With traditional hardware, for every 100 computers you have, you'll replace 1 hard drive. A new hard drive will cost a fraction of the machine's initial price, let's say 1/5. So maintenance costs for storage devices are 1/500 the initial costs per year, maybe a bit more if you factor in the cost of the labor. Now if you make the same cluster of servers out of ARM hardware, let's say you'll need 4x the number of machines to get the same processing power. That's 400 machines. If the storage devices on these machines have the same failure rate, you'll need to replace 4 machines per year. However, since you're buying a new machine, you're don't get to pay for just the storage device. It costs you 4/400, or 1/100 the initial cost to maintain the storage devices for your ARM cluster per year. A huge assumption here is that both types of hardware have similar initial costs. So the point here is that it'll always be cheaper to compartmentalize your losses, unless ARM devices are much cheaper than traditional commodity hardware. Intuitively, throwing away a whole machine when something breaks is going to be a lot more expensive than just replacing the broken part. I don't imagine that it's extremely difficult to make parts replaceable on ARM boards, and it would definitely save some money, so I don't see why it shouldn't be done. (Also, I realize that the Beaglebone uses SD cards, which are cheap and replaceable. But imagine that instead of storage devices, I'd used memory for the example)

nico_h 14y ago

Anyone else blocked by the stupid cloudflare scam about not having 3rd party cookies enabled meaning you have virus on your computer? And preventing them from reading the article?

EwanToo 14y ago
I didn't know Cloudflare was that harsh, that's frustrating, sorry about that :(
- nico_h 14y ago
  I had to read your fine post from the google cache, missing on the pretty pictures: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hUwlhkhc_pAJ:www.ewanleith.com/blog/956/my-60-arm-server+http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/956/my-60-arm-server&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hUwlhkh...
  - EwanToo 14y ago
    Hmm, I might need to disable cloudflare then, frustrating really as it's a clever service.
    - driverdan 14y ago
      Set the CloudFlare security level to low. I found anything above low results in too many false positives which ends up frustrating legit users like nico. I don't know why 3rd party cookies would matter though.
jgrahamc 14y ago
Huh? I browse constantly with third party cookies disabled in Safari and Chrome and never have a problem. I can see that site perfectly. And that's certainly not how CloudFlare decides that your machine is likely to be infected. What are you seeing when you visit the site?
- 14y ago

lucian1900 14y ago

I plan to do a very similar thing with my Raspberry Pi.

darkstalker 14y ago
I want to replace my router with a Raspberry Pi, but seems impossible to buy one
- eblackburn 14y ago
  Yeah. I've been on the waiting list for months :(
- lucian1900 14y ago
  Just to make you feel bad, I've just been notified mine got shipped and I'll get it soon :) They are getting sent, just slowly.

seclorum 14y ago

I use my two Open Pandora's as build servers. They work just like any other PC in the house, with the difference that they can be easily unplugged and pocketed, as well. Fantastic little machines, and once you get a development environment up and running, they function extremely well.

Vizualni 14y ago

Excellent idea!

rwmj 14y ago

Personally I wouldn't trust a microSD card for any production role beyond being a bootloader. You'll be paged one day only to find you had to make a time-consuming visit to your co-lo, and that all your data was irretrievably gone. The solution to this is to have one "real" PC acting as a NAS and serving iSCSI. You would have to divide the extra cost of this PC across all the ARM servers you have.

toyg 14y ago
I run a Dreamplug pretty much 24/7, as my "homebrew" backup and NAS solution; the SD is used to boot and then mount an external RAID enclosure connected via eSATA, which holds the real data. Works quite well, in a fraction of the space that a "real" pc (or even a MacMini) would need.
- AUmrysh 14y ago
  I love these Marvell plugs, my only gripe is that the community wiki is just spam now :( What site do you get your OS images from?
  - toyg 14y ago
    Usually from links on http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/ http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/
nico_h 14y ago
Micro SD are notoriously bad for server usage, they are designed to store infrequently changed files for a while, like mp3 collection, cameraphone snapshots, apps etc... Going with a brand name might help. In order to extend their lifespan, you might want to minimize the writes by disabling some logs and the "last access" updates on files (`noatime` for "no access times"). Some examples: http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/ http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-usi...
- icebraining 14y ago

jk 14y ago

"Micro-SD card performance is highly variable, and generally rubbish" Agree with that. I use a pandaboard as a build server and I felt it is a lot efficient to use NFS than running off an SD card. Ewan, have you tried USB HDD instead of SD card?

EwanToo 14y ago
I think that's probably the next experiment, I'm not sure if I'd got for a HDD or a very small USB SSD to keep the power usage down - at the moment it's under 0.5W, a HDD will be several times that.
rlpb 14y ago
Pandaboards run much faster with USB hard drives instead of SD cards. That's what I hear from lots of knowledgeable people, anyway. I've not actually run any benchmarks though.

jarofgreen 14y ago

Interesting article but pls fix website for mobile readers http://twitpic.com/9o9q35 http://twitpic.com/9o9q35 I would have commented on your blog but on Firefox the "about me" floats over the disqus column so I can't.

EwanToo 14y ago
Ouch that's ugly isn't it? It's obviously not good enough. Will see about sorting it, thanks.
lucaspiller 14y ago
I've noticed most HN posts from blogs suffer this issue... I was thinking of a "Your Site Doesn't Work On Mobile" notification service...
- jarofgreen 14y ago
  YES DO IT (I would help if I had spare time, I'll just wish you good luck instead)

runeks 14y ago

"[...] ARM servers are a big part of the future [...]" Has anyone actually compared x86 and ARM doing some sort of comparable task, and measured how much power they both consume performing the same task? I know ARM uses a lot less power than x86, but if it uses 10 times as little power but takes 20 times as long to do the same task as an x86 server chip, it still uses more power. I'm not saying it isn't more power efficient than x86 (it certainly has that potential, because of all the old cruft in x86), but I just haven't seen any evidence that supports this claim. Or am I missing the point? Is power efficiency not the main reason for ARM servers?

timthorn 14y ago
It all depends on the workload, but one public comparison (from the vendor and in a press release, but with some figures): http://www.low-latency.com/blog/cantor-evaluating-calxeda-arm-chips-10x-breakthrough http://www.low-latency.com/blog/cantor-evaluating-calxeda-ar...
AUmrysh 14y ago
The Ubuntu team was talking at SELF a few years back about using ARM clusters as web servers because of the low cost, high efficiency, and high core density you can achieve with the low-heat ARM chips.
mbell 14y ago
In many server applications your not CPU bound but rather IO bound. In those applications using the lowest power CPU makes sense. These are the applications ARM seems to be targeting first. Examples: $5 month static + php only website hosting market, front end load balancing, static file serving, etc. The other possible target is embarrassingly parallel work loads where you really just want to cram as many cores into a given space as possible. Usually the limit of how many cores you can put in a rack is either power or cooling, not space. Where you probably won't see ARM in the near term is on work loads that are highly single threaded and performance critical. I think this is exactly the type of situation your describing.
sciurus 14y ago
See Google's paper 'Brawny cores still beat wimpy cores, most of the time'. It concludes that 'Slower but energy efficient “wimpy” cores only win for general workloads if their single-core speed is reasonably close to that of mid-range “brawny” cores.' http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36448.pdf HTML version at http://bit.ly/KOhENi http://bit.ly/KOhENi

rythie 14y ago

If it had a lot more memory that would be interesting. Though really you can get a 256Mb VPS for £5/month http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ and you don't have a setup charge or unreliable hardware.

lucaspiller 14y ago
I was thinking about this as well... maybe not in comparison to cheap providers whose performance are variable, but for £12/month from Linode you can get a 512mb VPS with 20GB of disk space. How does the performance of this ARM box compare to a Linode?
- rythie 14y ago
  Well, for a ballpark figure: md5sum of 3.4 kernel.tar.gz (average of three runs) 512Mb Slicehost 2.2Ghz Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE = 0.275 seconds 512Mb BeagleBoard XM 1GHz Cortex A8 = 2.023 seconds
  - argus 14y ago
    where was the file stored on the beagle? that could explain a good part of the difference in results you're getting.
    - rythie 14y ago
      time dd if=linux-3.4.tar.bz2 of=/dev/null is 0.7 seconds on the beagleboard and slicehost is more variable but comes to down to 0.5 seconds after a few goes from (1 second). I'd expect it to be read from the page cache anyway. However, I remembered that the beagleboard is using busybox and really the systems are very different from each other, different distribution for example. Update: busybox md5sum is about 20% slower than regular md5sum.
rwmj 14y ago
ARM has strange limits on the amount of memory. The Versatile architecture supports up to 256 MB max. The Versatile Express architecture has a 2GB limit (and no PCI!) Then you have to remember that ARM is presently 32 bit, so you're going to have trouble going over 4 GB at all, which is currently a very small amount for a serious server. 64 bit ARM isn't going to be widely available for at least another 2 years, and at what cost we just don't know (but it's not likely to be £60/server).

nl 14y ago

There have been mentions on the OpenStack mailing list of various experiments NTT is doing with ARM servers. I don't think there is much information public about it yet though.

Maakuth 14y ago

I run a GuruPlug with filesystems on a LVM volume built from e-sata and usb hard drives. It's very fine for my personal needs, except the GP's crazy heat output. What I hope is that some manufacturer built ARM boards with loads of SATA controllers. That way one could build a very affordable large NAS's.

shirro 14y ago

If someone (looking at SanDisk) were to make a range of SD cards for servers and lightweight ARM desktops that would be of real interest. Because the current stuff out there for phones and cameras is of variable quality and is about the worst thing about these new lightweight arm systems.

pinkeye 14y ago

Checkout TonidoPlug2 (http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html). It has 512 MB DDR3 RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi b/g/n and in-built enclosure for SATA II HDD. You can boot it directly from the SATA instead of internal flash. All the right things you need in a personal server. Also it runs debian squeeze.

j_col 14y ago

Very cool, I've been wanting to do something similar with a personal server for some time.

darklajid 14y ago

Another site that is unreadable on a mobile device because the options to share the content are hiding the content itself. Is there any browser/browser & extension to remove that... stuff? Maybe an adblock filter, a greasemonkey script or something similar?

EwanToo 14y ago
Someone else pointed that out, it's not good is it? I've disabled the AddThis bar while I look into it (the caches might keep it alive for a while though), hopefully there's a suitable solution.

gizzlon 14y ago

On a related note, VIA makes small motherboards with embedded CPU's. They're not as cheap, but they act more like "real" pc hardware, are i386/686 compatible and use very little power. I've run a fan-less EPIA board at home for a couple of years, and it's nice. Took some time to find the right board though.. http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/ http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/

hmottestad 14y ago

HP has their Project Moonshot which is a rack server solution using multiple Calxeda ARM servers attached to a main board for power and networking. [HP] http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx [Engadget] http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/hp-and-calxedas-moonshot-arm-servers-will-bring-all-the-boys-to/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/hp-and-calxedas-moonshot-...

rbanffy 14y ago

I'd love to see a Aubrey Isle like processor based on ARM cores - with many ARM cores sharing a 2 GB pool of fast memory. The Intel cores on the Aubrey Isle chip are fairly large and take up most of the silicon on the die. An ARM-based design would be much smaller and cheaper to manufacture. Now that I said it, I wonder how much more expensive would be a RAM chip incorporating an ARM core versus pure memory. It would be interesting to have "smart memory" that could do things like "sha-384 this range and ping me back when you're done". Assuming other threads are not using that same component for other activities, it could be done basically "for free".

mathnode 14y ago
Best thing about ARM? It's cheap, so you can just pick and choose between distributed or shared memory models.

xxiao 14y ago

use Marvell's sheevaplug is better off for this. beaglebone is really for industrial control, beagleboard are for generic purpose while pandaboard is for mobile computing. SD cards are made for consumer class cameras, but you can buy industrial level SLC SD, for $50 per 4GB, in that case I will just go with SSD.

rmoriz 14y ago

I build a couple of ARM "servers" out of a PandaBoard (dual core + 1 GB RAM) and a self-made case (lasercutter) http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmoriz/sets/72157629535790241 http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmoriz/sets/72157629535790241 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:18645 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:18645 They're running Linaro, the Ubuntu-ARM-development-fork by ARM/Linaro.org

videmsky 14y ago
Whoa! It's like a micro-server and a makerbot mated. Nice!
- rmoriz 14y ago
  I even made a cheesy video ;-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX61U_q6ksg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX61U_q6ksg Board: http://pandaboard.org/ http://pandaboard.org/ OS: http://www.linaro.org/ http://www.linaro.org/

videmsky 14y ago

Is anyone eyeing the new Atom for servers? Thinking about a bunch for a modest low power cluster. http://goo.gl/fWdwd http://goo.gl/fWdwd