When this came up last time, it turned out that there was some kind of a deal in place, and certainly many if not most published pictures of the Wikimedia data center feature rows of shiny Dell logos. But Dell does support Microsoft and the NSA, obviously, and also supports some very creative accounting methods to avoid paying taxes with tax havens. Dell's corporate structure adventures are not the sort of corporate behavior concordant with a mission to empower anyone other than Dell stockholders.
If you don't like Cubietrucks, then how about RADXA? At least with http://dl.radxa.com/rock/docs/hw/RADXA_ROCK_schematic_20130903.pdf you know exactly what you're getting and it doesn't cost a huge power bill. We still failover when machines go out of service, and sure the caches would have different RAM configurations, but the fact is it doesn't cost more money to switch to ARM, and you jettison a bunch of legacy x86 crap that nobody uses but take millions of transistors which need to be powered. Why ask our donors to keep all those useless transistors warm?
And as much as I personally appreciate Wikimedia staff, I am inclined to agree with the sentiment that perhaps we should hire more staff until we get some who believe that it wouldn't cost $100,000 to transition to less expensive hardware. And maybe some people who know how to order chassis?
Best regards, James
*"And as much as I personally appreciate Wikimedia staff, I am inclined*
*to agree with the sentiment that perhaps we should hire more staff until we get some who believe that it wouldn't cost $100,000 totransition to less expensive hardware. And maybe some people who know how to order chassis?"*
What makes you think they don't?
Dan Rosenthal
On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 10:55 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
When this came up last time, it turned out that there was some kind of a deal in place, and certainly many if not most published pictures of the Wikimedia data center feature rows of shiny Dell logos. But Dell does support Microsoft and the NSA, obviously, and also supports some very creative accounting methods to avoid paying taxes with tax havens. Dell's corporate structure adventures are not the sort of corporate behavior concordant with a mission to empower anyone other than Dell stockholders.
If you don't like Cubietrucks, then how about RADXA? At least with http://dl.radxa.com/rock/docs/hw/RADXA_ROCK_schematic_20130903.pdf you know exactly what you're getting and it doesn't cost a huge power bill. We still failover when machines go out of service, and sure the caches would have different RAM configurations, but the fact is it doesn't cost more money to switch to ARM, and you jettison a bunch of legacy x86 crap that nobody uses but take millions of transistors which need to be powered. Why ask our donors to keep all those useless transistors warm?
And as much as I personally appreciate Wikimedia staff, I am inclined to agree with the sentiment that perhaps we should hire more staff until we get some who believe that it wouldn't cost $100,000 to transition to less expensive hardware. And maybe some people who know how to order chassis?
Best regards, James
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"but the fact is it doesn't cost more money to switch to ARM, and you jettison a bunch of legacy x86 crap that nobody uses but take millions of transistors which need to be powered."
ARM is not compatible with a lot of our software, and besides if we really wanted power efficiency we could instead buy Intel's 14nm chips. Virtualization also helps.
New servers always cost a lot, and it's not trivial to switch over hundreds of boxes. That's because you're not going to make ARM CPUs work as drop-in replacements.
On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 7:55 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
When this came up last time, it turned out that there was some kind of a deal in place, and certainly many if not most published pictures of the Wikimedia data center feature rows of shiny Dell logos. But Dell does support Microsoft and the NSA, obviously, and also supports some very creative accounting methods to avoid paying taxes with tax havens. Dell's corporate structure adventures are not the sort of corporate behavior concordant with a mission to empower anyone other than Dell stockholders.
If you don't like Cubietrucks, then how about RADXA? At least with http://dl.radxa.com/rock/docs/hw/RADXA_ROCK_schematic_20130903.pdf you know exactly what you're getting and it doesn't cost a huge power bill. We still failover when machines go out of service, and sure the caches would have different RAM configurations, but the fact is it doesn't cost more money to switch to ARM, and you jettison a bunch of legacy x86 crap that nobody uses but take millions of transistors which need to be powered. Why ask our donors to keep all those useless transistors warm?
And as much as I personally appreciate Wikimedia staff, I am inclined to agree with the sentiment that perhaps we should hire more staff until we get some who believe that it wouldn't cost $100,000 to transition to less expensive hardware. And maybe some people who know how to order chassis?
Best regards, James
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On 30/12/13 14:55, James Salsman wrote:
If you don't like Cubietrucks, then how about RADXA? At least with http://dl.radxa.com/rock/docs/hw/RADXA_ROCK_schematic_20130903.pdf you know exactly what you're getting and it doesn't cost a huge power bill.
Maximum 100 Mbps ethernet connection. Also, it doesn't exist yet.
We still failover when machines go out of service, and sure the caches would have different RAM configurations, but the fact is it doesn't cost more money to switch to ARM, and you jettison a bunch of legacy x86 crap that nobody uses but take millions of transistors which need to be powered. Why ask our donors to keep all those useless transistors warm?
Are there some benchmarks which support this idea? I read
http://armservers.com/2012/06/18/apache-benchmarks-for-calxedas-5-watt-web-server/
But it was full of distortions, like comparing the actual power usage of the ARM system with the TDP of the Intel system, and then using a workload which saturated the network link of the Intel system versus the CPU of the ARM system. Maybe this sort of fluff is part of the reason why Calxeda went bust.
Marketing materials on Calxeda's website indicated that the system was priced such that it would be more expensive than Intel on a per-MIPS basis, but that you'd win in the long run through reduced power bills. It didn't sound like a cheap solution to me.
I read this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/13/facebook_arm_chips/
But it was clear that it was only at a prototype stage -- the benchmarks are not in yet because the development work needs to be done first. I read this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/16/google_intel_arm_analysis/
which speculated that Xeon may still be better for CPU-intensive tasks, and ARM chips may be useful for storage control. But a Cubieboard or Radxa can't be used for storage, since they lack the necessary high-bandwidth connections.
Leslie Carr wrote:
At that point we'll probably need to redesign those boards which are incapable of doing these things, so we'll need a team of hardware engineers, plus a deal with a manufacturing plant.
Google and Facebook are apparently taking that route. Maybe some day, this technology will be available for anyone to buy.
-- Tim Starling
On Dec 29, 2013, at 9:11 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Leslie Carr wrote:
At that point we'll probably need to redesign those boards which are incapable of doing these things, so we'll need a team of hardware engineers, plus a deal with a manufacturing plant.
Google and Facebook are apparently taking that route. Maybe some day, this technology will be available for anyone to buy.
-- Tim Starling
One hears rumors of enterprise grade hardware manufacturers floating product ideas to customers (cough) but rumors persist that paying customers actually calculate bandwidth issues for their applications and generally say no. The ones who say yes tend to be academics in strange corners of the money / compute cluster CPU vs IO trade space, and are ok with building their own.
-george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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