Thin Servers with Smart Pipes: Designing SoC Accelerators for Memcached (2013)

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44 points·luu··5 comments

This sort of cloud scale thinking about power usage/performance is how we'll clean up the environmental record of the data center industry.

Think about how this sort of thing when applied to AWS ElastiCache would reduce the coal fueled electricity footprint of the thousands of startups that use that service.

It reduces energy usage, but also the useful lifespan of servers. Commodity servers can be pushed into different (lesser) roles when they get older, but specialty kit cannot. More specialty kit means more e-waste, and more e-waste means more toxic metals in the soil.

FPGAs in a networked kit like this could still be repurposed in some way, yeah? Perhaps not as broadly as the typical server.

I'd be astonished if they use FPGAs in production kit. Once they get the circuit design right, even a modest quantity of (static) ASICs would be cheaper than FPGAs, and probably faster.

That said, if this really takes off, I'm sure some enterprising spirit will write some software to re-purpose these things as-is (I'm thinking something like a VMWare driver to turn them into NVRAM-SANs for disposable "worker" VMs)

>This sort of cloud scale thinking about power usage/performance is how we'll clean up the environmental record of the data center industry.

i wonder whether writing efficient programs running in efficient environments would be the best way. One can imagine something similar to CAFE standards, or like one day EPA banning Java, Python, etc from scaled deployments :)

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