[Beowulf] Register article on AMD OCP motherboards

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

From: <Hearns>, John Hearns <john.hearns at mclaren.com<mailto:john.hearns at mclaren.com>>
Date: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 3:56 AM
To: "beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>" <beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>>
Subject: [Beowulf] Register article on AMD OCP motherboards

Recent discussion on small clusters with PC-104, mini-ITX and Pi boards has brought the list closer to its roots.

Maybe big systems are headed the same way (I know we have discussed this before).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/15/amd_roadrunner_opteron_ocp_systems/

I guess the financial market is driving the design as they, well, buy a lot of them!

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
With integrated cloud services then the Beowulf idea of building systems from tower PCs will be untenable in the future (*)
but we will be using the highest capacity commodity systems – which are likely to be something like these cloud/virtualisation platforms.
Sorry if this thought is a bit muddled.

(*) Yes I KNOW we don’t use tower systems any more – I’m just trying to say that the definition of COTS will change



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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…)

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