[Beowulf] AMD Roadrunner open compute motherboard

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

I think the idea behind OCP is to be pretty conventional and pedestrian.. They weld the "rack" enclosure out of 2" square steel tubing.  Their model isn't to get the highest performance in the densest area, but rather, the lowest cost per performance.  The kind of thing where you can hand the fabrication drawing to any shop and have them build it.

Raw floor space for their applications probably isn't at a premium (i.e. they're not installing facebook servers in Manhattan at a kilodollar/square meter/month.. they're putting them next to power plants so power costs are low and near toxic waste dumps or swamps or something where land is cheap).

If you're building a large warehouse type facility, floor space isn't as expensive as wall length: concrete tilt up construction and the like.  Or the "racks of computers in shipping containers on gravel pads in a field next to a wind turbine " type facilities

Jim Lux

-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Mark Hahn
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 10:03 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] AMD Roadrunner open compute motherboard

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/16/amd_roadrunner_open_compute_mo
> therboard/

these things seem incredibly conventional.  I was hoping for something a little creative, like heatpipes in the chassis, mating to a liquid-cooled cold plate in the rack.  how about super-caps in the PSU to provide enough hold time to dispense with UPSs?  how about a distributed switching fabric, like 6x10G port in each node, with an FR4 in-rack subnet.
something with dram stacked on an interposer with the cpu die?

regards, mark hahn.
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf