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Thanks Joseph!

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 12:28 AM, Joseph Sinclair <plug-discussion@stcaz.net
> wrote:

> These are part of an interesting (IMO) trend toward using less traditional
> system architectures, in this case using much less powerful ARM chips (an
> ARM does a lot less per clock than an equivalent x86_64 CPU) in large
> numbers to provide basic (i.e. low per-page computation) web services, to
> more effectively fill a target niche.
> Website serving (in most cases) is exactly the type of low-CPU high-I/O
> task that's perfectly suited to very large numbers of weak CPU cores.  Each
> request can easily run on a different core, but pushing a page (even one
> generated from *simple* JSP/ASP/PHP) takes very little CPU.  Running a lot
> more cores helps, but running expensive fast cores does not (this is
> mitigated somewhat by event-driven servers like NginX, but more cores is
> still better).  You will need a ton of network and disk I/O, but things like
> tcp-splice, tcp-offload, a copy-free TCP stack, memcached, membase, FusionIO
> cards, etc... are making that a very reasonable proposition for a Linux
> system like these.
> As a side note, that's always been the advantage of Mainframes (which are
> still used for a LOT of stuff) for similar types of line-of-business tasks
> (like transaction processing); they don't have a lot of raw CPU, but they
> can push bits at rates an x86 couldn't dream of matching.
> The advantage of these ARM based systems over a distributed or
> mainframe-type system is that they're a few orders of magnitude less
> expensive, ideally suited to web serving, and use vastly less space, power,
> and cooling than a commodity system with the same page-per-second capacity.
> I would never even think of using one for something like a database server,
> but as the web front-end they're pretty close to ideal.
>
> GPU computing (e.g. CUDA or OpenCL) is another example of alternative, more
> targeted, architecture; this time for extremely parallel high-CPU/low-I/O
> tasks (the opposite of what these ARM boxes are suited to).
>
> I predict that we will see a continuing diversification of system types as
> different types of tasks and new computing techniques drive a need for a
> wider variety of non-traditional architectures.  I read an interesting
> article on the IEEE website today about using memristors as a similarly
> novel computing architecture to accomplish tasks currently solved by neural
> processing algorithms because a memristor array acts, in some ways, like a
> neural array.
>
> I should note here that these ARM systems won't replace x86 systems, just
> as x86 hasn't replaced mainframes.  These new architectures will expand the
> diversity of systems in use; existing systems will still be used where they
> make sense, and these new systems will take over in niches where they
> significantly outperform existing approaches.
>
> Stephen wrote:
> > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/23/zt_systems_arm_server/
> >
> > so what is plugs thought on this. Aside from pre-shipping with Linux
> > (ubuntu) i can see how low power server nodes for those itty bitty
> > nibble tasks can make sense, but they are looking to push a ton of
> > little cores soon.
> >
>
>
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