Group Blog
This group blog, open to everyone, is a place where you can read, react, and respond to topics around desktop management. Discuss and debate real world IT issues with your peers.
Below is very the latest thread:
Sunday 28 December 2008, 10:00am
NASA supercomputer tracks climate change
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The US space agency NASA has built the world's third largest supercomputer to model climate change - and used commodity Intel Xeon processors.
The design of the Pleiades system, which has opened in NASA's Ames research centre in California, pushes the limits of Infiniband communications by extending the interconnect out to make a LAN linking multiple systems, in a hypercube topology with 64 end points, according to a report in EETimes.
The machine actually has 21 miles of Infiniband cables, linking its 12,000 quad-core Xeons, with dual 20 Gbit/s interconnects. This currently provides 487 teraflops of Linpack performance, but NASA plans to take this to more than a petaflop in the next two years, and to 10 petaflops by 2012.
NASA previously used Itanium processors which might have more powerful individual cores than Xeons, and passed over IBM Power6 chips, because quad-core Xeons offer more "bang for the buck" and let NASA choose how much RAM per core to use. The machine was built by SGI.
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RedditSaturday 27 December 2008, 10:00am
The datacentre on wheels
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Rackable Systems has a new spin on mobile computing: 16 Intel Xeons, and 40 terabytes on wheels.
The MobiRack enclosure uses smaller-than-usual systems, and can be wheeled up against the wall and plugged in to the mains. The makers tell InternetNews, that it's an architecture which couldn't be done with blades.
It also requires processors that run relatively cool if you are going to simply plug this in outside of a datacentre with custom cooling. Yet another example of the way better processor architectures can change the game.
The full specs are here, but we think there are one or two gaps. We're hoping that any reviews will test speed, acceleration and cornering, as well as processing power. A job for Top Gear?
Friday 26 December 2008, 10:00am
Intel vPro education goes down under
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Australia now has centres dedicated to helping users get to grips with Intel vPro, and components like AMT.
AMT (Active Management Technology) can save a lot of money, but it won't do anyone any good unless they activate it, as we have been saying in Make the Case. Activation can be a bit daunting, so an Australian systems integrator has opened three centres, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, which will show vPro and how to use it.
"vPro technology has been in the market a while now, but many customers are still not utilising its benefits," Frank Colli, MD of Leading Solutions told ARN. "vPro comes into its own when you talk about lowering costs or maintaining a PC fleet.”
Thursday 25 December 2008, 10:00am
Recycled servers - green or just naive?
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We've spoken a lot in this blog about the return on investment (ROI) from buying new servers. But some people still argue it's greener and better to keep old servers going, rather than use the raw materials in new servers?
However, as we've said here before, older servers waste more electrical power and take up more space. Replacing them will save money on running costs. But how about replacing with refurbished systems? The idea gets a good consideration over at TechRepublic.
The kit is cheaper, and it probably won't be the latest generation, but some of the disadvantages don't wash, the article says: Refurbs often have the same warranty as new systems - and some regard the previous usage as a "burn-in", weeding out systems with random errors.
So the stigma around refurbs is mostly irrational - but the site does find one serious drawback. You can't always get all the systems you want, and you can't enforce a policy of uniformity. For many companies this is very significant indeed - it's just as well that the economics work out positive on new systems.
Wednesday 24 December 2008, 02:00pm
Multi-core - can you trust it?
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A couple of years ago, there was discussion about whether multi-core systems were really suitable for safety-critical systems. The answer? Yes they are.
Multiple processors usually make a system more reliable, more stable, and more suitable for use in circumstances where people will depend on it. If one fails, then others can continue, perhaps giving time to fix the broken one.
While multi-core is a multi-processor architecture, there are differences. Among the most obvious is the fact that the cores in a processor, of necessity, get their power and data from the same connections - so multi-core doesn't eliminate the single point of failure.
"What really interests me is the suitability of multi-core devices for safety-critical systems," said Paul Parkinson, a senior systems architect with Wind River in the UK. "The type of software platform which can be supported seems to be dependent on the level of flexibility of the multi-core architecture, and whether the cores can be configured to operate in an independent manner, or whether there is coupling and/or dependencies between the cores as there are obvious ramifications in a safety-critical environment."
The problem comes down to "fault propagation paths", said Maarten Koning, a senior principal technologist at Wind River. If one part of the system fails, it can cause others to go down, sometimes in complex ways - for instance if one processor makes a lot of unnecessary disk reads, it might appear to be carrying on with its own work - and yet be blocking another processor which relies on that disk for a steady stream of fresh data.
Do multi-core chips help or hinder this? "Multi-core processors are one opportunity to insert a barrier for fault propagation paths," said Koning. "Simply put applications on separate cores so that they can’t steal CPU from each other directly. Multi-core processors are like having time and space partition technology in hardware."
There are problems though: "With multiple operating systems on a multi-core processor or even in a single processor with multiple virtualised processors, the layers of software in our devices get thicker and even harder to fathom," says Koning.
Fast forward to the present - and companies are launching products that use multi-core for safety-critical systems, with the benefit that they can be used in COTS (commercial off the shelf systems) which government bodies prefer to buy, over highly customised special boxes.
Kontron's PENTXM2 uses LynxOS-178, which was fully tested in "a large European global positioning system programme". It has 1.67 GHz (low power) dual-core Xeons, along with a server class memory controller hub (MCH) and up to 4GB of RAM.
More importantly, the company is confident it can perform as it is supposed to. So it looks like that's another question answered.
