How Google Spawned The 384-Chip Server

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/seamicro-and-google/

by coolrhymes • 15 years ago

60 23 15 years ago

a9• 15 years ago

So all those folks who always say "memory is cheap" and who make fun of others who write small conservative programs might not be so smart after all.

Because they can't run their "feature-rich" unconstrained applications on wimpy nodes. And thus they can't cut their employer's energy and real estate costs.

Why did Google abandon its plans to supply its own energy?

nknight• 15 years ago

> So all those folks who always say "memory is cheap" and who make fun of others who write small conservative programs might not be so smart after all.

Your first hint that an opinion comes from a neophyte is that they make fun of others. Your second hint is that they have an un-nuanced worldview.

> Why did Google abandon its plans to supply its own energy?

They didn't. They shut down part of their alternative energy R&D efforts, then turned around and dumped about $100 million into new solar projects. And they've never stopped putting PV panels on their datacenters. Mass media somehow misinterpreted this as an abandonment of some grand strategy by Google.

brandon• 15 years ago

Today, Mozilla is using SeaMicro’s older 512-core machines to handle downloads of its Firefox browser

Can anyone comment on the accuracy of this? "Handling downloads" is pretty vague, but still it seems like a pretty braindead job, and I know Mozilla is leveraging lots of mirrors and probably CDNs for this.

wmf• 15 years ago

"Today, when an end user running Firefox wants to download an update, addon or persona, the browser sends a URL request to Mozilla’s download cluster. The servers running Linux, Apache, and PHP run a query to the backend database/memcache cluster and return an HTTP Redirect URL (also called an HTTP 302 return) back to the browser so that Firefox can fetch the desired file from the network of donated download resources."

http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy...

Retric2• 15 years ago

Let me get this strait, it's basically (request)>(redirect) for a few MB's of data. That seems like the kind of thing where a single CPU could handle ~100,000 requests per second. I know the Firefox team is not exactly well know for writing fast code, but there must be more to it than that.

Drbble2• 15 years ago

Note that semiconductor sells Atom cards which are about 10% of a Xeon core in power and energy. So 512 core isn't 43 2x6core Mac Pros, it is more like 4.

hga• 15 years ago

Note, as of yet due to its dependency on Intel's Atom line SeaMicro on only can't offer much memory per chip but they also can't offer parity or ECC, which is a much bigger deal killer for me.

icefox• 15 years ago

Anyone else find it odd that seamicro.com doesn't give you any way to actually buy their product?

Someone• 15 years ago

Not really. This product is aimed at large enterprises. The more or less expected behavior is:

- you call them, fill in a form, or meet them at an expo.

- their sales team contacts you to discuss whether you can 'help each other'/'find a win-win scenario'.

I have heard that second step described as "they figure out how much they can charge you for their product"

In some sense, this is the epitome of "do not price your stuff at what it costs, price it at what it is worth".

fierarul2• 15 years ago

Kinda like asking $1000 for a glass of water from the man almost dying of thirst but accepting $3 from the man that's jogging and wants a sip.

The problem is I've always seen explanations where pricing is set my the market demand. I'm curious how an economical model would look when there is no market, just this sort of individual negotiations with zero transparency.

Edit: This reminds me of the "how much is your time worth" sales question. Imagine how much a billionaire pays his maid.

jff• 15 years ago

This is exactly right--by leaving numbers off, they don't set up false expectations. So you call them up and say you want 1 rack, they quote you $100,000. Facebook calls them and says they need 1,000 racks, they're going to sell them for $75,000 due to the scale of the purchase.

Now, if they were selling consumer-targeted items, they'd probably give a quote. But, if you wanted to buy a couple hundred, it would still behoove you to call them up and ask for a deal, because selling 1,000 units to 1 customer is a hell of a lot easier than selling 1,000 units to 1,000 customers.

Roboprog2• 15 years ago

Is nothing: in Soviet Russia, 384 servers chip YOU!

(I am so gonna get dinged, now :-))

Roboprog2• 15 years ago

Seriously, though, they might need to look at getting chip manufacturers to up the low-power-core count on each chip to make these packages fit together more efficiently.

mjwalshe• 15 years ago

384 isn't that much you can easily get 500+ full fat cores in a full cab for HPC systems and that is leaving 2U for the infiband tor switch

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

My favourite in this field was SiCortex, who were killed by a cashflow interruption at the start of the GFC.

How Google Spawned The 384-Chip Server

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