Archive For November 29, 2010
I love high-scale systems and, more than anything, I love data from real systems. I’ve learned over the years that no environment is crueler, less forgiving, or harder to satisfy than real production workloads. Synthetic tests at scale are instructive but nothing catches my attention like data from real, high-scale, production systems. Consequently, I really…
Achieving a PUE of 1.10 is a challenge under any circumstances but the vast majority of facilities that do approach this mark are using air-side economization. Essentially using outside air to cool the facility. Air-side economization brings some complexities such as requiring particulate filters and being less effective in climates that are both hot and…
I’m interested in low-cost, low-power servers and have been watching the emerging market for these systems since 2008 when I wrote CEMS: Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers for Internet Scale Services (paper, talk). ZT Systems just announced the R1081e, a new ARM-based server with the following specs: · STMicroelectronics SPEAr 1310 with dual ARM® Cortex™-A9 cores ·…
Earlier this week Clay Magouyrk sent me a pointer to some very interesting work: A Couple More Nails in the Coffin of the Private Compute Cluster: Benchmarks for the Brand New Cluster GPU Instance on Amazon EC2. This detailed article has detailed benchmark results from runs on the new Cluster GPU Instance type and leads…
A year and half ago, I did a blog post titled heterogeneous computing using GPGPUs and FPGA. In that note I defined heterogeneous processing as the application of processors with different instruction set architectures (ISA) under direct application programmer control and pointed out that this really isn’t all that new a concept. We have had…
The Top 500 Super Computer Sites list was just updated and AWS Compute Cluster is now officially in the top half of the list. That means when you line up all the fastest, multi-million dollar, government lab sponsored super computers from #1 through to #500, the AWS Compute Cluster Instance is at #231: Position…
Kushagra Vaid presented at Datacenter Power Efficiency at Hotpower ’10. The URL to the slides is below and my notes follow. Interesting across the board but most notable for all the detail on the four major Microsoft datacenters: · Services speeds and feeds: o Windows LiveID: More than 1B authentications/day o Exchange Hosted Services: 2…