I was thinking about the seamicro box - 512 atoms, 64 disks and either 64 Gb ports or 16 10G ports. it would be interesting to look at what the most appropriate "balance" is for mips/flops of cpu power compared to interconnect bandwidth. maybe the seamicro box is more intended to be a giant memcached server - that is, the question is memory bandwidth/capacity versus IC bandwidth.
in any case, you have to ponder where the amazing value-add is - compactness? I'm not sure it competes all that well compared to 48 core-per-U conventional servers (whether mips/flops or memory-based). here's an idea, more commodity-oriented (hence beowulf): suppose you design a tiny widget that gets all its power via POE. maybe Atom or ARM-based - you've got 15-20W, which is quite a bit these days. for packaging, you need space for a cpu, nic and sodimm. maybe some leds. plug them into a commodity 1U 48-port Gb switch, then stack 10 of them and you've got a penny-pincher's approximation of a Seamicro SM100000! not going to win top500, but... _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
