- Monday, 9 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
I invented ctrl-alt-del but Bill [Gates] made it famous - Dave Bradly IBM PC designer
Microsoft powers data centres with netbooks
SOFTWARE behemoth Microsoft is experimenting using tiddly netbooks to run data centres.
A netbook processor uses a fifth of the power of a typical server processor, although it only manages about a third the performance and is a lot cheaper to make.
According to Jim Larus, director of software architecture for data-centre futures, while a data centre would require three times as many netbook processors it would still run on less juice than a typical server set up and be cheaper.
The processors being used are apparently none other than Intel's low powered Atom, interesting because if firm's like Microsoft decide the experiment went well, it could decide it would rather use Atoms to power its data centres, resulting in Intel's big margin server chip market disappearing sharpish.
When the INQ put this to an Intel spokesman, he snapped "Why do you think a server version would be cheap?", adding "a clever journalist will find nehalem's power efficiency most appealing to this kind of app". Ouch.
Feeling hurt and rejected, we approached an Intel spokeswoman instead, who kindly gave us another response. "Intel purpose built Intel Atom for internet centric, affordable computers",
Connie Brown from Intel Media Relations told the INQ, adding "Of course OEMs and other industry leaders can research and do whatever they like with the processors. This will be an interesting one to watch".
Indeed it will Connie!µ
L'INQ
Computerworld
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Actually,Microsoft powers data centres with "internet centric, affordable computers" according to that article, not netbooks - which of course refers to a registered Psion trademark ;-)
...why the Zune social and marketplace are soo god damned slow.
While it makes sense to use low power processors, the Atom was designed for minimal power consumption mainly by lmiting the number of threads. It's ideal for netbooks, but the impact of being single-threaded shows when you're loading a complex website or running multiple applications. Using more conventional notebook processors, such as mobile Cores makes more sense than trying to shoehorn a processor that was designed for an entirely different purpose. Heck, one can even build a datacentre with several Core Duo Thinkpads and achieve the low power consumption goal.
I'm what is referred to as a Distributed Computing addict, which means I enjoy contributing power(computer cycles) to researchers who need to use a lot of crunching power on some relatively small amounts of data. While many people simply attach Internet-connected computers to various projects to donate power, some people actually go out of their way to specifically build computers for Distributed Computing purposes. Since these computers tend to run 24/7 at 100% cpu usage, the amount it crunches for a given amount of power becomes very important.
It would be interesting indeed, not to mention embarrassing for many DCers, to discover netbooks(or laptops for that matter) crunch more information for a given amount of money.
Does this mean that Microsoft will now optimise their software and remove bloat? Could we have a version of Exchange that ran on a dual processor, dual core, Atom-based server? Would be good to see, as having power-efficient hardware is only half of the story if the software runs the processor at 100% utilisation on a permanent basis... Green software anyone?
It's alright if you are Microsoft and can afford all of the software licences. I suppose you could use Linux though...
And I do recall looking at VIA based 1U servers at one point for low power, high density racks in a similar vein. And wasn't there a hosting company that used Mini Macs in a similar way? So this is not exactly a new idea.
Remember good old Transmeta?? With the low-power processors like Crusoe and Efficeon? While they were mostly targeting the mobile segment, if you could read their announcements and intensions, one of their goals was clearly the high density servers.
There has even been a company - Orion systems? if I remember correctly the name - that had presented a desktop-like workstation system that was using a great number of these processors in a form called Computer Workstation Based on Cluster Technology. From a quick search I found this announcement - http://investor.transmeta.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=142300 but I'm pretty sure that I had even read on TheINQ about this.
Furthermore, have you seen the mainframes / supercomputers from IBM that sport the small PPC 4xx processors?
The dual core variant of atom has 2 threads per core totalling 4 threads per CPU. How is this single threaded?
I presume that a commercial design will use the pinky nail size processors in some kind of blade architecture (is blade 2006, what do you use now, leaf? snowflake?), but for a test setup I suppose they could be using a cupboard filled with actual netbook computers?? (Running Windows XP? Puh-lease.)