Interviews: Ask Technologist Kevin Kelly About Everything 135
Kevin Kelly has for decades been involved in some of the most interesting projects I know about, and in his roles as founding editor (and now editor at large) of Wired Magazine and editor of The Whole Earth Catalog has helped spread the word about many others. Kelly is probably as close to a Rennaisance man as it's possible to be in the 21st century, having more-than-passing interest and knowledge in a range of topics from genetic sequencing and other ways that we can use measurement in pursuit of improved health to how technology is used and reused in real life. Among other projects, he's also the founder of CoolTools, which I consider to be (unsurprisingly) the closest current equivalent to the old Whole Earth Catalogs. (Disclaimer: I've had a few reviews published there, too.) (He's also one of the founders of The WELL, now part of Salon.) Kelly is also Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Long Now Foundation, the group which for years has been designing a clock to ring on 10,000 years in the future. Below, ask questions of Kelly, bearing in mind please the Slashdot interview guidelines: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment. He'll get back soon with his answers.
Re:512 Atoms in 10U (Score:5, Informative)
They're using 256 dual core Atoms, for 512 cores at 1.6Ghz. Those 2.3Ghz Opterons will do roughly twice the work per core as the Atoms, with eight cores per chip, four chips per box, a 1U box will replace roughly 32 Atoms, requiring 8U to achieve the raw power of the 10U SeaMicro box. Those 32 processors run 80W ACP each, so including memory, disk, and chipset, you're looking at 3-4kW under load, versus 2-2.5kW for the SeaMicro.
So how much will this thing cost you? The CPUs are $500 apiece. $300 for a 1U case. $800 for a board. $60 for a 4GB stick of registered ECC DDR3, times eight per processor. $275 for four 120GB SSDs. You end up around $6K per box. Now the SeaMicro uses Infiniband for its internal networking, for communication intensive tasks. Lets do the same. $900 each for dual port 40Gbps cards, and another $6K on a 36-port QLogic switch.
That adds up to just over $61K, versus $150K for the SeaMicro box of roughly equivalent performance. For nearly three times the cost, you get maybe a third lower power consumption. At worst you have double the power consumption, an extra 2kW, and say one more for the AC. That's 30 YEARS before you make up the difference in initial cost. Therein lies the problem with SeaMicro claims. They compare power consumption against hardware two and three generations old, the servers that are going to be replaced. If you actually compare them against new hardware, they're pretty mediocre.