Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 5 Aug 2003 00:04:22 -0300 | From | Werner Almesberger <> | Subject | Re: TOE brain dump |
| |
David Lang wrote: > exactly, Alan is saying that the hardware optimizations aren't nessasary.
Eventually, you'll want them, and if it's only to lower the chip or pin count.
> putting an Opteron on a NIC card just to match the other processors in > your system seems like a huge amount of overkill. you aren't going to have > nearly the same access to memory so that processor will be crippled, but > stil cost full price
You might be able to get them for free ;-) Just pick the rejects where the FPU or such doesn't quite work. Call it amd64sx :-)
But even if you get regular CPUs, they're not *that* expensive. Particularly not for a first generation design.
> (and then some, remember you have to supply the thing > with power and cool it)
Yes, this, chip count, and chip surface are what make me feel queasy when thinking of somebody using something as powerful as an amd64.
> as long as tools are written that have the same command line semantics the > rest of the complexity can be hidden.
You want to be API and probably even ABI-compatible, so that user-space demons (routing, management, etc.) work, too.
> and even this isn't strictly > nessasary, these are special purpose cards and a special procedure for > configuring them isn't unreasonable.
I'd think thrice before buying a card that requires me to change my entire network management system - and change it again, if I ever decide to switch brands, or if the next generation of that special NIC gets a little more special.
> I'm saying treat the one machine with 10 of these specialty NIC's in it as > a 11 machine cluster, one machne running your server software and 10 > others running your networking.
You can probably afford rather fancy TOE hardware for the price of ten cluster nodes, a high-speed LAN to connect your cluster, and a switch that connects the high-speed link to the ten not-quite-so-high-speed links.
Likewise for power, cooling, and space.
And that's still assuming you can actually distribute all this.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina werner@almesberger.net / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |