[SunRescue] What to use bunches of New Netras for, was Re: New Netra

[Christopher Byrne]

Well from my stnadpoint the new netra pretty much rocks, accepting it's two
major flaws.

1. IDE only
2. 10/100 only

Most Co-lo centers are pushing for all their users to go to fiber. In fact
in some new Exodus centers they are ONLY allowing fiber into the cage. That
means in order to put a bunch of these in my Co-lo I need to buy a good
switch with a fiber bridge.

What I would really love to see sun do on ALL their machines is to create a
modular connecter interface. So the basic circuitry is on the motherboard,
and for a nominal cost (say $100, about the same price as a GBIC in bulk)
you can stick a module in it for 10/100, 100LX, 100SX, 1000LX or 1000SX.
That would really make the service providers happy.

Also the lack of a truly high speed interface limits its usefulness in a
cluster. The real limit of effectiveness for massivley parralell clusters is
the interfaces between the nodes of the cluster. The number of nodes  for
peak efficiency under ideal conditions running 100bTX is around 16 or so.
Anything more than that, and the network becomes the major bottleneck. That
being said, in order to get a 16 processor sun box I would need to by an
E6500 which runs aroung $500k with 16 processors. Now obviously it's not
going to preform like a 5500, but I'll bet you that it will neat a fully
loaded 3500 under most conditions (six processors) and one of those bad boys
sells for around $200k. It might even beat a fully loaded 4500 (under ideal
conditions I'm sure it could)

So let's see, 16 systems (Netra $1000, max ram $500-750 (4x256 in bulk run
around $125 a piece if you get a good deal), additional hdd $250-500, total
around $2000 even if you dont get a great RAM deal) $32k, add one 16 port
non blocking switch with a gbic based gigabit interface for about $2k, and a
nice server cabinet for another $3k and for a total of around $35k hell add
another $5k for padding (cabling, power strips fans etc...)so $40k you have
a serious technical computing farm going.

16 X 400MHZ processors
16 GB RAM
640 GB storage (mirrored of course so effectivley 320GB)
Total network throughput 1.6gb full duplex (more like half that
realistically)

Now that's pretty hard to beat.

What would I do with these system? Easy, run a full cluster solution like
stonebeat or something similar, and turn them into one seriously rocking
fully balanced service cluster. First application, gigabit firewall. One
that can actually get about a gigabit worth of throughput unlike all of the
other so called gigbit firewalls out there, which right now are selling in
the $100k plus range, and only pump about 400mb through under ideal
conditions.

Chris Byrne




-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Mike Hebel
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2001 20:27
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Re: New Netra


Oh, I don't know...bug SETI at home/Processtree to produce a multi-processor
version of their software. ;-)

You could build one hell of a streaming MP3 player for your home network if
you could get the between-nodes latency low enough or buffer it properly.

There's probably programs that allow you to use a cluster to do distributed
video rendering.

You might be able to use a cluster for one hell of a load-balancer if I
understand the technology correctly.

The possibilities are endless. ;-)

Mike Hebel

Note:  All information from this person this evening is suspect due to a
low-grade fever, lack of sleep, and miscellaneous non-prescription drugs.
YMMV.

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