
A Cheap 12-Core, 30-Watt Ubuntu Cluster - voodoochilo
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExNTM
======
fiatmoney
For comparison, you can now get < 35-watt Intel Ivy Bridge processors, with 2
or 4 physical cores. Would not be surprised to see them outperform on a
performance / watt or performance / $ basis, especially if you're running
OpenCL accelerated computations on the GPU.

[http://ark.intel.com/products/65703/Intel-
Core-i5-3470T-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/65703/Intel-
Core-i5-3470T-Processor-\(3M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz\))

<http://ark.intel.com/products/65735>

[http://ark.intel.com/products/65714/Intel-
Core-i7-3517U-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/65714/Intel-
Core-i7-3517U-Processor-\(4M-Cache-up-to-3_00-GHz\))

~~~
madmaze
the wattage measured here is not just the processor, its also the entire
boards.

Ive done some benchmarks testing Intel Atom processors Atom330's and D525's
against Tegra3 processors. On average the Terga3 processors outperformed the
Atoms 4x-8x in Flop/s per Watt.

Admittedly that is not the only important metric, but gives an initial
performance comparison between ARM and x86 performance

~~~
DeepDuh
That being said, the Atoms themselves are nor a good benchmark in performance
/ Watt. I'd rather be interested in a comparison vs. current gen. xeon or
interlagos systems. Sounds silly, but ARM has been making progress and I could
see them being used in the future as companions to GPUs in computing clusters.
With current GPGPU computing models like OpenACC it does not really make sense
to put 16 race horses (Interlagos) besides an ant colony (Fermi GPU), except
if you head for high flexibility.

~~~
mtgx
Well, I think Intel wants Atom to compete with ARM for that market, so it may
be relevant.

There's also Nvidia's Project Denver, which will probably come out in 2014.
It's based on the 64 bit ARMv8 architecture, it's a custom CPU made in
collaboration with ARM, and I think they want to pair it with their next-gen
GPU architecture Maxwell. It's intended for servers and supercomputers.

~~~
DeepDuh
I've heard about that Nvidia project. I think they are on the right track. The
only thing that's missing is enough programmers (und thus software) for this
model. As an example (and I'm saying this as a layman in terms of databases) I
think that DBMS might be able to profit a lot from the GPGPU based model. For
high read traffic databases you could scale a system with n GPUs, based on how
much "storage" the database needs (the storage being the GPU ram, continuously
mirrored to harddisks when writes occur).

------
ilaksh
Ah, I like the general idea, but why bother with a cluster of ARM for 12
cores? You can get a 12 core AMD in one machine.

Or if you want really low power usage, there is this
[http://www.tilera.com/sites/default/files/productbriefs/Tile...](http://www.tilera.com/sites/default/files/productbriefs/Tile-
Gx%208036%20SB010-01.pdf) with 36 cores on one chip (of course that's not
especially cheap).

This doesn't seem like a very useful example.

~~~
ericmoritz
yeah this 12 core cluster costs about $2,000 for 12 Panda boards.

~~~
mtgx
I may be wrong, but I think the PandBoards are not really meant to be put in
servers (they are meant as development boards, right?), and they are
significantly more expensive than if you'd buy a 12 core ARM cluster
specifically meant to be used as a server.

------
zokier
I can't imagine that the 96 core cluster would be either power efficient or
cost efficient compared to Intel offerings. Assuming 3 watts and $100 per core
(which align fairly well to the figures presented in the article), 96 core
cluster would draw nearly 300 watts and cost nearly $10000.

Contrast that to eg Intel E5-2650L[1]: 8 cores, 16 threads, 70 watts and $1200
price. Obviously the whole system cost would be much higher, but I find it
hard to believe that you couldn't get/build two 2-socket systems with such CPU
for $10000. The CPUs alone would draw 280 watts, which would put the whole
system power consumption in the same ballpark as the ARM cluster.

Remaining question would be performance. ARM cluster would have 50% more
(logical) cores, but I'd imagine that Intel would have far higher per-thread
performance. And for lots of tasks the 100M Ethernet of the Beagleboard as an
interconnect could become a bottleneck.

[1][http://ark.intel.com/products/64585/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-...](http://ark.intel.com/products/64585/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-2650L-\(20M-Cache-1_80-GHz-8_00-GTs-Intel-QPI\))

------
eupharis
Finally a Hackernews post that inspires poetry:

    
    
      Snoozeworthy mobos
      But wooden dish drying rack?
      Stroke of pure genius!

------
iSloth
Would be interesting to know what application it's actually going to be
running? what task it's going to be doing?

~~~
sp332
It's for Phoronix to test new ARM-based software products, mainly
benchmarking. The second paragraph:

 _This cluster will be used for delivering some interesting ARM Linux
benchmarks, of course! It's also being used for Phoronix Test Suite purposes
for creating more MPI/cluster benchmarks for some of the commercial/enterprise
clients, coming up with more ARM Linux benchmarks in general, and this
hardware is also going to be part of a much larger (~96+ ARM core cluster -
details to be shared at a later time) cluster._

------
jackalope
I like the idea of independently replaceable boards, but the drying rack isn't
the answer. It may be great for heat dissipation, but you'd be surprised how
many dangers are present in an apparently empty room (dust, ceiling leaks,
your hipster keychain, etc.).

~~~
impoverished
Why isn't there a market (equal to the one for boards like these) for
enclosures, "home racks" or something similar to house these things? Or is
there a market but this guy just wanted to save a few quid?

------
wtracy
Wow, my employer sucks and is blocking Phoronix. Anyone want to summarize this
until I can check it from home?

~~~
sp332
Six dual-core PandaBoard ES boards stuck in a wooden dish-drying rack :) One
of these draws a max of 5-6 watts under heavy load, so the whole "rack" should
stay around 30 watts during cluster benchmarking etc. It's not completely
assembled yet so there are no real numbers. Total cost about $1500.

~~~
wtracy
I was seriously considering trying something like this with either the
Raspberry Pi or the APC <[http://apc.io/>](http://apc.io/>).

It looks like one PandaBoard can roughly match the CPU horsepower of four APC
boards at a slightly lower price, so that's good to know. The Raspberry Pi
might still beat out the PandaBoard in terms of purchase cost-to-Megahertz
ratio. We'll see. :-)

~~~
punit
Don't just look at MHz/$. The Raspberry Pi has a ARM v6 compatible core vs the
PandaBoard which has a v7-A core, i.e., Raspberry Pi MHz < PandaBoard MHz.

~~~
eupharis
Do you know of anyplace that quantifies the actual performance difference of
the different ARM versions? Just want to see the general improvement jump over
time

------
kristianp
Might be handy for a cheap Memcached/Redis cluster. I wonder if there are
boards with the full 4gig of RAM? Probably 1 or 10 gig network would be better
for that, though.

------
IsTom
100 Mb Ethernet doesn't sound like much. How performant are these ARM
processors compared to x86-64? Are they 32 or 64 bit? What's the type or RAM?

