Feeble processors power Internet sites at low cost

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 19 October 2009, 15:32 IST
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Feeble processors power Internet sites at low cost
Bangalore: Researchers believe flash memory and feeble processors can do what conventional servers can't: power Internet sites at low power and low cost.The researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh think 98-pound weaklings of the computing world might be better suited for many of the jobs on the Internet. Today's servers store data on a combination of slow but capacious hard drives and fast but expensive memory. As reported by the CNET News, the alternative the researchers have advocated is FAWN (Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes). It's described in a paper just presented at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. FAWN relies on flash memory, storage technology with a price and performance in between the two. Its CompactFlash memory cards are more ordinarily found in higher-end digital cameras, but they are relatively easily repurposed since they communicate with a conventional hard drive interface. In addition, each computing node in the FAWN system doesn't use powerful Xeon or Athlon processors. In their place are cheap and relatively anemic models - a five-year-old AMD chip in the first prototype and Intel's Atom for handheld PCs and eventually mobile phones in the second-generation design under way, David Andersen, the Carnegie Mellon Assistant Professor of Computer Science who helped lead the project. The system uses a front end to communicate with the outside world, and an internal network adds reliability and flexibility. Each processor runs a stripped-down version of Ubuntu Linux. And addressing the brains in FAWN's design, start-up SeaMicro apparently is developing Atom-based servers with numerous processors. Founder Anil Rao is one inventor on a SeaMicro patent application for a computer system with numerous independent processor modules that share access to shared resources including storage, networking, and boot-up technology called the BIOS. The FAWN approach can be adjusted with hard drives or conventional memory to match various sizes of datasets or rates or the queries retrieving that data. The approach can be tailored for different varieties of work. For larger data elements that need not be accessed as often, FAWN clusters could be built with conventional hard drives. For those with smaller data elements needed even more frequently, FAWNs could use more conventional memory. The use cases of FAWN are often central to companies at the center of the ongoing Internet revolution. However, Andersen claimed that if somebody wants to commercialize it, they would better think about changing the name. "I worry no manufacturer will ever want to produce a device called a wimpy node."

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