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    SubjectRe: TOE brain dump
    On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Larry McVoy wrote:

    > On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 01:13:24PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
    > > 2. router nodes that have access to main memory (PCI card running linux
    > > acting as a router/firewall/VPN to offload the main CPU's)
    >
    > I can get an entire machine, memory, disk, > Ghz CPU, case, power supply,
    > cdrom, floppy, onboard enet extra net card for routing, for $250 or less,
    > quantity 1, shipped to my door.
    >
    > Why would I want to spend money on some silly offload card when I can get
    > the whole PC for less than the card?

    you may want to do this for a database box where you want to dedicate your
    main processing power to the database task, if you use a seperate box you
    still have to talk to that box over a network, if you have it as a card
    you can talk to the card much more efficantly then you can talk to the
    seperate machine.

    if your 8-way opteron database box is already the bottleneck for your
    system you will have to spend a LOT of money to get anything that gives
    you more available processing power, getting a card to offload any
    processing from the main CPU's can be a win.

    yes this is somewhat of a niche market, but as you point out adding more
    and more processors in a SMP model is not the ideal way to go, either from
    performance or from the cost point of view.

    on the webserver front there are a lot of companies making a living by
    selling cards and boxes to offload processing from the main CPU's of the
    webservers (cards to do gzip compression are a relativly new addition, but
    cards to do SSL handshakes have been around for a while) used properly
    these can be a very worthwhile invenstment for high-volume webserver
    companies.

    also the cost of an extra box can be considerably higer then just the cost
    of the hardware.

    I know of one situation where between Linux OS license fees (redhat
    advanced server) and security software (intrusion detection, auditing,
    privilage management, etc) a company is looking at ~$4000 in licensing
    fees for every box they put in their datacenter (and this is for boxes
    just running apache, add something like an oracle or J2EE appserver
    software and the cost goes up even more). at this point the fact that the
    box only cost $200 doesn't really matter, spending an extra $500 each on 4
    boxes to eliminate the need for a 5th is easily worth it. (and this
    company is re-examining hardwaare raid controllers after having run
    software raid for years becouse they are realizing that this is requiring
    them to run more servers due to the load on the CPU's)

    at the low end you are right, just add another box or add another CPU to
    an existing box, but there are conditions that make adding specialized
    cards to offload specific functionality a win (for that matter, even at
    the low end people routinly offload graphics processing to specialized
    cards, simply to make their games run faster)

    David Lang
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