

Perspectives on SeaMicro's Innovative Intel Atom Server - timf
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/06/14/SeaMicroReleasesInnovativeIntelAtomServer.aspx

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hga
Most important bit of insight in this article: no ECC (Atoms are consumer CPUs
and as far as I can tell Intel is very rigorous about limiting ECC to official
server chips).

ADDED: in his reference post
([http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedE...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedECCMemory.aspx))
he says " _All AMD processors whether server, embedded, or client have ECC.
All ARMs have ECC._ " and makes some other very interesting comments,

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Tamerlin
That does limit the applicability of the Atom-based cluster to things like web
applications. It would do nicely for running a memcached cluster, as well, as
long as the interconnect latency is low enough.

~~~
hga
How much CPU does memcached use? I.e. is this 1.6GHz Atom with 2GB of memory a
good match; it's got 1TB for a fully populated $139K box,

~~~
Tamerlin
It doesn't consume all that much CPU, though it is possible to saturate it.
The trick is to take advantage of the smooth scaling model: you an add
memcached nodes until you run out of nodes. The clients have a list of nodes
as part of their configuration, and the client runs the hashing function,
which includes mapping the entry into the proper node.

So the only real overhead that each node has to deal with is serialization.

It's very simple, so it works very well. :)

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IgorPartola
My #1 question in this case is how do the various virtualization technologies
scale out. I suspect they don't very well, but if they did, this obviously
would be a huge win.

~~~
hga
Could you be more specific in what you mean by "the various virtualization
technologies"; e.g. are you referring to the ASICs?

~~~
IgorPartola
I was talking about Xen, OpenVZ and the like. I've been recently exposed to
the market of VPS hosting and I wonder how much lower can the prices be driven
with this type of technology.

~~~
hga
Yes, that's an interesting question, although I wonder what you precisely mean
by "scale out".

E.g. one thing that comes to mind is management, although it's pretty clear
that VPS hosting providers have means of dealing with many many Xen instances.

With 2 GB max per core, space will be at a premium, the smallest practical
Dom0 will be desired (I use Xen as an example because it the one I'm familiar
with). VM load balancing will likely be required for good service, and the
interconnect fabric ought to make that pretty cheap.

Compared to AWS, this particular SeaMicro solution will only provide something
like a Small Instance which has 1.7 GB, the next step up is 7.5 GB.

This could prove interesting, I'm sure there are plenty of VPS niches it will
service well, _if_ the no ECC issue is not a customer service showstopper as
others have wondered on the main HN SeaMicro thread.

~~~
IgorPartola
Thanks for the detailed response. I mean "scale out" in the sense that the
linked post means it: scaling from one giant CPU to a few smaller ones.

Yes there certainly are many niches: from small e-mail relays to DNS servers,
there are plenty of applications where the RAM/storage requirements are low
and most of the time the box would be IO bound waiting on a network resource.

