Beowulf - Single Board Computers? (long)

[Douglas Eadline]

On Sun, 20 Sep 1998, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> > OK, so this is something I know a little about; I've been
> > wanting to use SBCs for a Beowulf system for some time now,
> > and have been shopping the SBC market for a couple of years.
> 
> Well, I'm not sure if your restriction to "S"BC is killing you or
> what, but:
> 
> 1) Alta Technologies does sell a quite compact rackmount system built
> out of a conventional motherboard, so it's quite cheap and uses
> whatever today's hottest motherboard is. I think that there are other
> vendors out there selling systems which have a 90 degree "bus bender"
> that allows you to have 3.5 inch thick systems (www.aspsys.com), again
> using cheap commodity motherboards. The 3rd company I know of in the
> cluster market, Paralogic (www.xtreme-machines.com), seems to only
> sell a relatively compact conventional case with cards at right
> angles, which is about as big as a normal pile of PC's. (Hey, Doug,
> check out small cases. They're cool, and they are required to be able
> to bid on my latest $400,000 RFP.)

Xtreme Machines will have a 2U solution.  We are testing
various options at this point.  There are some "non standard"
things we are trying to include in our case.

In general, we find packaging becoming a bigger issue for customers.
I have just read the threads about make smaller "computer nodes"
and I have some comments.

1) There is trade-off between commodity price and compact packaging.
   Compact packaging is not an issue for the masses. Therefore,
   any compact packaging is going to increase the price of a system
   and "move it away" from a commodity base.  Using commodity
   components means that the latest and greatest are readily
   available, but it is also the "lego" we get to play
   with.  The low prices for commodity clusters are due to
   using "commodity lego".  If we have to start designing 
   our own lego pieces, then the price goes up.


2) I am sure that we (and others) will develop more dense
   packaging schemes, however, the volumes need to be there 
   to provide a lower cost.  In addition, keep in mind that
   selling and supporting a unique packaging system also
   requires the vendor (if they do not want to get run out of
   town) to be able to support such a product - which in turn
   means the vendor has to design and test such a product -
   which takes time and money...  

After saying all that, I believe some lower density solutions
will be developed over time.  At one end of the spectrum
were things like nCUBES and Transputers, that put the
essentials (CPU and RAM) on a credit card sized module,
and on the other are piles of putty colored cases stacked on
a shelf (or floor). I believe a good compromise 
maybe somewhere in the middle.

Doug
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