SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/hotpower_10_chun.pd...
The tl;dr version is that what you really want are hybrid datacenters, where you can assign various workloads to different types of machines, and use each machine type for what it's best suited to do.
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT090909050...
for a comparison of various types of chips.
The only way to get meaningful performance per watt data is to actually run real workloads on various processors.
I would love to watch that thing boot, haha. SO many penguins!
Would this be different? If there are 512 cores...would it show a penguin for each core?
Sorry, like I said, I haven't actually watched the boot process on a linux machine for quite some time, and now I'm a bit curious...
Sorry if this question is juvenile or stupid or something.
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleases...
Another write-up with names and tech details here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/14/seamicro_sm10000_ser...
This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...
Where are Sun, SGI, Cray, etc now?
I'm actually in Chippewa Falls at the moment. :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8
He talks about how this scheme can parallelize non-trivial data structures, and how tedious book keeping can be avoided. I haven't used it yet in a project, so I can't speak of its efficacy - but worth a watch, imho.
And while I don't know about Scala, Clojure is a little too young to obsess on preformance, each point release (1.0, 1.1, etc.) is delivering significant improvements.
The Atom is too underpowered and too RAM limited for individual systems - you would do better in most cases with a 2x quadcore setup and 32-64GB RAM combined with OpenVZ or Solaris Zones. Lack of ECC = automatic disqualification for me as well.
For a company that is doing a lot of web serving a la Facebook or eBay I can definitely see the appeal. In such larger cases, power usage dwarfs many other considerations.
The thing about being a VPS provider is that if your hardware chokes, your customers notice, and they get pissed. Sure, if you are running some kind of web farm you set it up so that things keep running without interruption if you lose a server. But if you provide VPS hosting and you lose a server? People notice, and they will be pissed. If you are a VPS provider and you loose customer data? they will parade your severed head around town on the end of a pike.
Amazon has successfully tackled this problem by training their customers that they can shoot a server at any time. This is good for them, but it's not how VPSs have traditionally operated. customers expect the thing to stay up and for their data to stay safe.
The big deal with ECC is that with non-ecc ram, you don't know when in-ram data was corrupted. If you have a bad bit of ram that is being used for our journaling/disk caching, it's pretty easy to corrupt your data.
If you've got ECC, it corrects single bit errors, and logs that there was a problem, and it can be configured to crash on double bit errors, rather than just silently corrupting your data.
If you use non-ecc ram, not only will bad ram silently corrupt your data, and sometimes crash your server, but there will be no indicator (other than random crashes) that the problem is in fact bad ram.
You can get away with not having ecc in large server farms if you have lots of checksums on generated data... but in a VPS type situation where people get pissed if you loose a single server, it's sure to end in tears.
how much power would that eat? in my setup, we'd be talking about 3840 watts, each one of those single socket 8 core boxes eats about one amp of 120v, give or take. they say 4w per server, so that'd be 2048 watts for their solution; so yeah, it will take quite a while to make up the price difference.
Now there are some reasons why having your own physical server is better than having a virtual slice, but many of those reasons have to do with I/O, and as these boxes don't come with local storage... so at least for my workloads, they still can't beat the nice, standard opteron G34 systems I throw together in my workshop.
If your power consumption figures are right, it would take 46 years to make up the difference at 10 cents/kW h. As I recall, you'd divide that by half for the cost of cooling, and then you'd have to figure in the lower capital costs of requiring 1/2 the cooling.
Also possibly subtract some network hardware. The box provides "Up to 64 1 Gbps or 16 10 Gbps uplinks". And it may be more "server grade" than your setup, it integrates load balancing and server management; at the very least, the hotswap granularity is smaller.
That still sounds off, except for companies that are running out of machine room space (the type of premium you pay for a laptop).
How sure are you of your alternative's power consumption? I.e. have you hooked one up to a Kill-A-Watt meter? They claim 1/4 of the power of "today's best in class volume server".
I think we're obsessing too much on the "$139,000" figure, if you look at http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38 you'll see there are so many options (1 or 2 GB per CPU, Ethernet and storage cards, possibly/likely some cost for the optional hot swap disk physical infrastructure, etc.).
To make a good comparison you'd need to figure out and price a system including load balancing and network hardware, measure it for real and contact SeaMicro to find out the real price for a comparable system from them. Plus until they work through their backlog they won't be too eager to discount....
my power figures are approximate, but real-world; This is what it says when you log in to the APC.
also, unless you own the data centre, cooling costs are priced into power. 2x20a 120v circuts are the most I can get in one rack (they don't want too much power density, right?) that's 30a 120v usable, or 3600 watts, and it costs me about a grand a month. Being as you can easily slot more than 30 pizza boxes in a 44u rack, density doesn't matter, because even my lowest density solution can give me more power density than the co-lo cooling system can handle, so when I'm pricing things out, I simply count each watt as costing me around $0.28 per month. Which includes rackspace, but as I said, in the data centres available to me, the factor limiting density is the cooling system, not my equipment.
Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.
Hm. But yeah, I should play more with LUGs in poor parts of the world; I've tried to give away stuff to local LUGs around here (in the SF bay area) but they usually have a setup they like already, and other providers falling over themselves to give them free crap.
(now, most of my advertising 'budget' was spent on, say, writing a book... but per-click ads are the opposite of what I want.)
I don't even /see/ them.
http://webgeekph.com/ http://www.philweavers.net/forums/
Or here:
Most of the time, the best way to access the best people is thru referrals. Drop me an email, I might be able to help you out.
I think most people there are from Luzon - the biggest island in the Philippines - has the biggest city - so it is probably more expensive there than to get someone from Cebu. http://www.mynimo.com/ is local to Cebu. Or you could try JobsDB.com OR Jobstreet.com (almost all the big companies in my place advertise in JobsDB.com and Jobstreet.com)
What sort of skills are you looking for? I know some people who can run Linux boxes.
Edit: Just contact me through my email in my profile since I am a bit busy at the moment to check HN regularly.
If you need money for a project to get kickstarted, try Kiva or Kickstarter.
On the plus site, if 5 of you can fit onto the EC2 small instance, it's only $6/mo, if you do a spot instance with a high maximum.
Kiva / Kickstarter is very interesting. I wished I have heard of these sites right before my "busy season".
Right now, I am planning to save up so that I can get a Linode for one year.
Personally, I won't touch any hardware until I can get it from more than one vendor (usually, until you get to that point it's too expensive. Their may not be much price pressure in the industry as a whole, but in my niche, there certainly is.)
right now there just isn't very much price pressure in the VPS industry
People keep telling me that margins are low in this industry. I mean, my prices are dramatically lower than others, and I imagine my my internal processes are rather a lot less efficient than the competition (we provision by hand, for example) also, we're not nearly at scale; I mean, we have 4 full racks and maybe 15Kw of power capacity total- I'm not making a lot of money, but I'm afloat on 1/2 the revenue and higher internal costs.
I mean, if you'll pay my bills, I'll pretty much do it for fun, so I'd expect my margins to be lower than most, but considering the price differences, some people must be making some serious coin.
Would this really work well for the intended market? There are lots of startups over here that plan on massively serving webpages - would something like this (only cheaper :) ) make you reconsider using whatever cloud services you're currently using?
Articles I found on Google:
http://gigaom.com/2010/06/13/seamicros-low-power-server-fina...
and the Wall Street Journal's take:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/06/14/seamicro-tries-to-ret...
Seamicro is using the same sort of lateral move that RISC made and that Transmeta attempted to apply: Could certain functions happen more efficiently if moved outside of the traditional 'box?'
Could a datacenter provide a low-latency infrastructure for front-end web-servers while reducing their power and other expenses? I think there's a good chance this is already being done.
You can tell from their "dollar savings" chart that they plan to claw back the money you save in price of the machine!
Compare this to a standard blade setup, where you could just swap out CPUs, or even an IBM System Z where you could hotswap the CPU, and service doesn't look so great.
You can hotswap each 8 CPU board.
I guess (de)muxing is close to that? Multiplexing many "request" amongst fewer real(non-virutal) objects.
That's exactly what I meant by "virtually (de)muxing everything but the CPU." I should have said, "CPU+chipset," though.
I wonder if their architecture is also (unintentionally) optimized for languages like Ruby/Python? I suspect that languages like those tend to have more CPU operations per IO operation. I wonder if anyone has researched this metric?
The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors.
What would make more sense is a comparison a datacenter for a company like Disney or Google or Amazon. I suspect that even though SeaMicro's rig would look pretty bad for heavy number-crunching apps, it would most likely do very well in web and database. Those apps don't need to share a lot of data between threads/processes, and they're generally I/O bound rather than compute bound. With proper caching setups, they're mostly network bound, rather than disk bound also.
Dell products have features and services that make them enterprise friendly, they are more than just hardware to the customer. So trying to compete with Dell head on might not be the company's best strategy at first. Perhaps following the strategy EMC used with CLARiiON to sell through DELL would be more of a money maker for the company.
Similar concept from Dell, from over a year ago. Although Fortuna seems bit more conventional, I'm not sure if it's a bad thing.
a) who would likely buy these (corporates, SMEs, startups)?
b) it seems that they have increased the risk of single point of failure (e.g. 1 PSU taking down 128 nodes) what's the mitigation strategy?
c) what would an architecture on a box like this look like? Should I just be thinking of it as a cheap set of VPS nodes?
d) People keep mentioning the kind of processing these chips are good for and not so good for. Can someone be explicit about good real world uses and bad ones?
b) It has four redundant power supplies, as do all systems of this size.
c) It's a Beowulf cluster.
d) See the FAWN, Amdahl blade, Gordon, and CEMS papers.
OTOH, I get the impression that the bulk of the power savings are not from the CPU at all, but from virtualizing the other components. Therefore, the pressure towards ARM is much less.
And I suppose Intel wouldn't be supportive unless there was a compelling long-term reason to choose Atom.
It seems we have an oversupply of CPU on modern boxes and an under supply of I/O speed (or space with SSDs) and memory.
> The startup is announcing today it has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.
And this move helps the future of ARM based servers , since ARM is more similar to ATOM than to XEON.
I wonder how Atom specific the ASIC is....
It could be a huge bottleneck between CPUs and RAM, because of concurrent access of so many CPUs to the memory while Atoms have a very small caches.
It means that real-world applications, like a multi-threaded services (especially JVM-based, or simply MySQL) could not be used efficiently.
I'm also very skeptical about hundreds of KVMs which is a the only working virtualization technology I know. =)
Per CPU (8 per board):
Atom Z530 (1.6GHz, Silverthorne)
US15 chipset (Poulsbo)
2GB DDR2
4 ASICs to virtualize IO
2x PCIe x16 connectors
No ECC of course, it being a non-server Intel chip. Each single cored CPU has its own DIMM.
* * * * EDITED to clarify the layout per CPU and per board after c00p3r made it clear I wasn't being clear. * * * *
The article quotes the interviewee saying that ARMs can be used, but not clear enough to determine if they actually have ARM versions of these machines, which I'd be very interested in seeing 100k specint_rate figures for.
Just look at the computers they are selling. most still offers 512M of RAM as a default. What can you run on 512? Nothing like having to upgrade the day you receive your product. Consumers by and large need the guidance of manufacturers to make the right HW choices and the manufacturers just want the cash. They will suck each segment dry until the market forces them to make the changes. That's progress?
With all the advances in multi-monitor add-on SW or the fact that Windows and Mac OS have been supporting multi-monitor control for years, try finding hardware already fitted with multiple display connections. In the end, the user is forced to customize their own equipment. And yes, I know most HN readers do this, but I am talking about the general public.
Great to see the little guys are still fighting. The big ones really don't give a damn.
A lot, really. I have rendered DVD quality movies, handled product composition databases and processed millions of orders on machines with less than 512 megs of memory.
Not many companies (or people) have enough data or volume to stress a machine with 512 megs of RAM. I agree it seems a pittance - my netbook has more than that - but if I break up memory usage by application here, Firefox takes most of the RAM, then Gwibber, then Rhythmbox. None of them would be running on a server.
It would be interesting to write down a list of what you can't do with 512M.
As I said before, I was referring to the general public. There will always be hackers or high-end users that can make miracles.
Bells and whistles are what makes computing fun for the average user. Why do you think the iPhone is such a hit? It's basic functionality? or the fact that you can have a lot of fun on it? It even sucks as a phone and people don't seem to mind.
In my IT business, the first thing I do for most customers is upgrade their RAM because their desktops come so poorly packaged and the performance is abysmal. Once done, I have never heard a complaint.
We need to stop talking about exceptions and start discussing general usage. Most users are running W7 or Mac OS X, and run a multitude of programs, apps and at the same time. I believe in breaking bottlenecks.
Lastly, I am glad to see smaller companies making a difference, like the one in the article.
their desktops come so poorly packaged People get what they pay for, and for a lot of people they pay a relatively small amount of money to a company that puts a large markup on the hardware in their PC so they end up with something cheap. Most higher end machines from the likes of Dell are pretty useable on the RAM front from what I see.
Most users are running W7 or Mac OS X On the server this doesn't matter at all. Servers run mostly Linux, generally with no UI. Or Windows Server - which runs with a UI not that much more advanced that what you might have found back with Windows 2000.
Lastly, I am glad to see smaller companies making a difference, like the one in the article. I'm sure we all are - but I don't think that they are making the difference you think they are. A 512 core server set-up won't help any user make a home video, listen to their music or play games. What it will help is large datacenters who can serve more requests simultaneously.
The consumer is mostly uninformed when it comes to their hardware needs and that is where the manufacturer should step in. As another HN article discussed, the confusion in PC model labeling is another example of this carelessness. Steve Jobs has always said the consumer does not know what they want, you have to tell them.
I should have said most consumers use Mac OS X or W7 and those machines need more than 512M of RAM.
In helping large data centers improve their power consumption, creating consumer products that inspire and ignite a passion or pushing larger competitors to continually have to innovate, smaller companies always make a difference.
They have billions for research at their disposal and they couldn't see that their equipment was too power hungry, would not be sustainable in the long run and probably needed re-tuning? I'm guessing they did.