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<span style="font-weight:bold">From: </span><Hearns>, John Hearns <<a href="mailto:john.hearns@mclaren.com">john.hearns@mclaren.com</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Date: </span>Wednesday, May 15, 2013 3:56 AM<br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">To: </span>"<a href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>" <<a href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Subject: </span>[Beowulf] Register article on AMD OCP motherboards<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Recent discussion on small clusters with PC-104, mini-ITX and Pi boards has brought the list closer to its roots.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Maybe big systems are headed the same way (I know we have discussed this before).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/15/amd_roadrunner_opteron_ocp_systems/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/15/amd_roadrunner_opteron_ocp_systems/</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I guess the financial market is driving the design as they, well, buy a lot of them!<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The other thought that has come into my head is that as the domestic market for PCs dries up – being taken by the tablet market<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With integrated cloud services then the Beowulf idea of building systems from tower PCs will be untenable in the future (*)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">but we will be using the highest capacity commodity systems – which are likely to be something like these cloud/virtualisation platforms.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sorry if this thought is a bit muddled.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(*) Yes I KNOW we don’t use tower systems any more – I’m just trying to say that the definition of COTS will change<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<div>But those clouds are made up of fairly vanilla systems, which can be used in Beowulfs. So while the consumer market may be tabletized, there's still a huge market for PCs to fill the datacenters that comprise the cloud. (unless we go back to maxicomputers
with many VM instances, simulating a bunch of PC scale boxes.. There you go, VM on big iron lives again…)</div>
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