From: <Hearns>, John Hearns <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 3:56 AM To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: [Beowulf] Register article on AMD OCP motherboards
Recent discussion on small clusters with PC-104, mini-ITX and Pi boards has brought the list closer to its roots. Maybe big systems are headed the same way (I know we have discussed this before). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/15/amd_roadrunner_opteron_ocp_systems/ I guess the financial market is driving the design as they, well, buy a lot of them! The other thought that has come into my head is that as the domestic market for PCs dries up – being taken by the tablet market With integrated cloud services then the Beowulf idea of building systems from tower PCs will be untenable in the future (*) but we will be using the highest capacity commodity systems – which are likely to be something like these cloud/virtualisation platforms. Sorry if this thought is a bit muddled. (*) Yes I KNOW we don’t use tower systems any more – I’m just trying to say that the definition of COTS will change --- But those clouds are made up of fairly vanilla systems, which can be used in Beowulfs. So while the consumer market may be tabletized, there's still a huge market for PCs to fill the datacenters that comprise the cloud. (unless we go back to maxicomputers with many VM instances, simulating a bunch of PC scale boxes.. There you go, VM on big iron lives again…)
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