[Beowulf] Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath

[holway at th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de]

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/index.html

High Frequency Trading is actually a tiny amount of the world wide
computer power. Far far less than HPC. This kit tends to be located
very close to the exchange anyway. and is generally uninteresting in
terms of green IT.

I recently met with one of the technical directors of Deutsch Börse
which is the major central european stock exchange.. They are just
moving their central trading platform from some VMS clustery thing
(before my time) to a Intel / Infiniband / RedHat cluster of no more
than 200 nodes of which about half were gateway nodes (with interface
cards for external connections to the finance houses). Its all small
time stuff.

So please cease debasing these discussions with 'Iceland will never
have datacenters because you cant use it for HFT". Thou speaks from
thyne arse :) HFT is far smaller than HPC which is tiny anyway.

Latency generally doesn't matter. I can ping www.whitehouse.gov in
30ms. www.number10.gov.uk in 23ms and, kinda ironically, 43ms for
www.berlin.de (I live in Berlin).

Also, really, this oil bath stuff will never happen in the main
stream. Some procurement process with buy it because of the numbers
and then regret it for all time in a semi public way. Then we can all
forget it and get on with what we have always been doing; stealing
partitions from the office to direct the hot air out of the door that
we have propped open with a chair.

I think most of us have had to replace all of the memory in our shiny
new cluster at some time or some other annoying task that involves
taking out every node and doing something annoying with a screwdriver
and that sharp edge that kept slicing under your thumb nail. I
actually nearly chopped of the tip of my finger on a 9000RPM fan. It
was not a neat wound.

Image doing that in rubber gloves with everything covered in goop. Brilliant.

ta for now.

Andrew

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> On 05/09/12 23:14, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>
>> I don't think they even bother with a proper enclosure per
>> motherboard.  Over the counter, commodity, cheap, almost hardware
>> agnostic.
>
> A Google talk I went to a few years back confirmed that's the case (or
> rather, lack of a case IYSWIW) for their nodes in their search
> clusters, but they did make the point they use more standard hardware
> for the services they make money from (like advertising) to get better
> reliability.
>
> Whether that's still the case, I don't know.
>
> cheers!
> Chris
> - --
>  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
>  VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
>  Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>  http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci
>
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