Creating a Low-Power Cloud With Netbook Chips 93
Al writes "Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have created a remarkably low-power server architecture using netbook processors and flash memory cards. The server design, dubbed a 'fast array of wimpy nodes,' or FAWN, is only designed to perform simple tasks, but the CMU team say it could be perfect for large Web companies that have to retrieve large amounts of data from RAM. A set-up including 21 individual nodes draws a maximum of just 85 watts under real-world conditions. The researchers say that a FAWN cluster could offer a low-power replacement for sites that currently rely on Memcached to access data from RAM."
Two different problems (Score:3, Informative)
Or to put it simply: pulling a "finished" object from memcached will almost always be faster then having a machine create/render/whatever you do to create the object. If you want to pull large amounts of data from RAM buy a 1U server that takes 64 gigabytes of ram for $5000 (so about $78 per gig of ram, and much faster than a compact flash card in a super cheap laptop). Or buy solid state disks/PCIe RAM cards. Now if we're talking about building a render farm for whatever (frames, objects in database, etc.) simply run the numbers, how many objects/sec/dollar do you get with different solutions and how important is latency.
What interests me is the ease of building a many node cluster and learning how to administer and write software for something with 20+ nodes.
Of course you could just buy computer time from amazon.com EC2 for $0.10 per hour per node and practice there ($2 an hour for 20 systems running. not bad).
Re:AMD Geode? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux FS for SDD drives? (Score:3, Informative)