Imagine a cluster of these...

[ddrueding]

I'm still imagining all the neat stuff I can do with tiny $200 computers.

Granted, they are snail-slow (AMD Geode 500Mhz, 256MB RAM), but cheap and really low-power. I'm temped to replace my VMWare linux test environment with a bunch of these; imagine an entire server room in a lunch box

 

[DrunkenBastard]

In total opposition to the green-friendly mini mobo you linked to, recently been working on installing/configuring multiple BladeCenter H class chassis and blades.

Each chassis requires two power inputs for redundancy, each of those connects in this case to two L6-30 receptables. That's almost 100A of power that needs to be available with failover taken into account (it has four 2900W power supplies). You could fit four of these 9U units in a single cabinet. Each blade has dual quad cores and 8 GB of ram, dual 72GB mirrored HDDs. That's 112 cores in a 9U height. The heat out of the back has to be felt to be believed. The blowers will flap your pants legs/hair at a distance of over 12 feet. These in particular are being used for astronomy/physics simulations running Red Hat as an OS.

 

[Bozo]

I would imagine that the cooling requirements for the room that the rack is in is pretty intense too. Another 100A to power the A/C unit.

Bozo :joker:

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Yes cooling is definitely a problem. We are building a new datacenter to deliver more power and cooling. Assuming 1 ton of cooling is enough for 3500W, a rack of four chassis could take 6 tons of capacity.

New place will give us additional reliability (dual 1.6 MW generators with an option for a third), plus we will have a dedicated high performance area for the real beasts such as the bladecenters. Should be enough for the next 5-10 years of growth, we can add more utility power in stages as well.

DR is provided by a secondary location (colo with dedicated raised floor space).

No matter how expensive the hardware, the electricity to run them will usually exceed initial capital cost.

 

[ddrueding]

I would imagine that the cooling requirements for the room that the rack is in is pretty intense too. Another 100A to power the A/C unit.

At least. I find the the AC is significantly more than the CPU consumption due to efficiency issues.

A while back I had a client with a tiny server room (the size of a walk-in closet). As the company grew, 2 full racks of servers went in there. If the AC failed, you were instantly screwed. So much heat in so little space guaranteed an oven in minutes.