New Orion workstation puts cluster in a box
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Orion Multisystems today unveiled a workstation that takes high-performance computing and puts it on the desktop using low-power processors from Transmeta and an innovative motherboard design.
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When the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) wanted to increase its computing capacity last year it considered a satellite datacenter or an extension to the existing building, but in the end it chose a faster and more novel approach: it ordered a datacenter in a box.The center, which does high-energy physics research for the U.S. Department of Energy, was one of the first customers for&#160;Sun Microsystems&#39; Project Blackbox, which takes standard shipping containers 20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.4m) and turns them into mini datacenters that can be delivered and operational in a few weeks, according to Sun.SLAC&#39;s Blackbox was delivered in July last year and was up and running by September. Aside from a few challenges -- like figuring out how to service the unit when it&#39;s raining -- the center is pleased with its choice and in the process of installing a second unit.It is one of four customers that Sun identified Tuesday to illustrate momentum for Project Blackbox. It also renamed the product the Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD. The boxes start at $559,000 without the &quot;payload,&quot; or the computers inside, and Sun will ship them around the world for an extra fee. Delivery to Amsterdam by air, for example, costs about $15,000.SLAC turned to Project Blackbox because it needed to expand its compute capacity fairly quickly. &quot;The datacenter here was at its capacity, especially in terms of the electrical service to the building and the amount of heat we could take back out. And the experiments needed their next year&#39;s worth of computing,&quot; said Chuck Boeheim, SLAC&#39;s assistant director of computing services.Modifying its existing datacenter to accommodate another major electrical feed and &quot;chiller plant&quot; would have taken one to two years and cost several million dollars. &quot;We also looked at doing a satellite datacenter in a smaller building, but with the approvals and lead time that was a couple of years out as well. Blackbox was something we could do very quickly,&quot; Boeheim said.The raw shipping containers are customized by a subcontractor, and Sun typically installs the payload before delivery. SLAC&#39;s Blackbox arrived on a flat-bed truck last July, fitted with 252 Sun Fire X2200 rack-mount servers, the same type it uses in its datacenter. Sun had also wired the servers to a Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch that SLAC provided before delivery.Boeheim described the process in a white paper on his Web site, along with photos and time-lapse videos that show the box being hoisted into place by a crane.Customers can put other vendors&#39; hardware in the unit, but not all equipment will fit. SLAC bought some Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers that it wanted to put in its second Blackbox, but they were too long for the server racks. Instead it will move some existing Sun servers to the box from its datacenter, and put the Dell machines inside the building instead.The computing center already had a 4-megawatt substation serving its area of the site. &quot;So it was a fairly simple matter to put a 220-kilowatt power pane on the outside of that and bring up a fairly standard chiller unit and put that on a concrete pad next to the Blackbox. Both of those things could just be fork-lifted in and connected up,&quot; Boeheim said.SLAC wanted to do a rigorous installation that would last several years, so it spent a few weeks getting the unit hooked up. It had to reconnect about half the power cords which had shaken loose during the truck ride. Aside from that the installation went smoothly and the machines were turned on for batch work Sept. 25, about two months after delivery. The 60-ton chiller and the outside power unit were also delivered in that time.Servicing the unit has presented some challenges. &quot;We&#39;re trying to figure out how to do it on a day like today when it&#39;s pouring with rain,&quot; Boeheim said recently. &quot;The wind doesn&#39;t have to be blowing very hard for the rain to blow in the end, and you pretty much have to open both ends of the box to service it,&quot;It&#39;s quite cramped in the box, he said, and both ends need to be open so that a person can maneuver when a server rack is slid out into the narrow central aisle.&quot;Our stance right now is to wait for a clear day to open it up,&quot; he said. Two people are needed to service the box in case one gets trapped inside or injured, he wrote in the white paper on his Web site. SLAC put a phone in the box in case someone gets locked in.The first Blackbox gave the center a roughly 25 percent boost in computing capacity, and the servers have been running as smoothly as their counterparts inside the datacenter, Boeheim said. &quot;Once we got them turned on they just ran. We went a full 30 days not even opening the thing.&quot; He put rack servers in the box rather than storage gear, because storage gear tends to need servicing more often, he said.Sun&#39;s Blackbox won&#39;t be for everyone. Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, New York, considered a Blackbox but decided on a new wing for its datacenter instead, Boeheim said. SLAC&#39;s experience may have been easier than that of an average business because it is a federal government site located on county land. A business in a city may need more planning permissions and permits.A few other companies offer comparable products, such as the Ice Cube from Rackable Systems, and the Infrastructure Express from American Power Conversion.Sun said it is happy with the&#160;momentum for Blackbox, although it wouldn&#39;t say how many customers it has. The other three it named are Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian industrial manufacturer that is using one at a new plant in India; Mobile TeleSystems, Russia&#39;s largest mobile operator; and the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.Most of the customers had no room to add capacity in their datacenters, said Darlene Yaplee, vice president for integrated platforms in Sun&#39;s systems marketing group. &quot;Half the customers are using it while they build extra datacenter capacity, and then it will remain for disaster recovery,&quot; she said.The next size up in standard shipping containers is 40 feet long. &quot;We could do 40 feet technically, but most people have been happy with 20 feet,&quot; Yaplee said. Boeheim said he&#39;d probably choose a wider box rather than a longer one, which would accommodate his Dell 1950 servers.
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Linux-based Open Workgroup Suite includes enterprise server and clients, plus tools.
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Ziff Davis - Silicon Graphics Inc. will ship a new ultra high performance Intel Itanium-based Linux workstation designed for scientific and medical applications.
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Orion Multisystems Inc. will emerge from stealth mode on Monday with news of its workstation product. The Santa Clara, California, company hopes to bring back the days of the technical workstation, when engineers
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The new xVM Ops Center can automate operations workstations running Linux and Solaris.
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Desktop features BTX motherboard for improved airflow.
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A Linux developer has come up with a virtualized I/O system that allows competing virtualization software to use one mechanism for handling storage and other virtual devices.
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TechWeb - The new server expected on Monday is built for companies who need an entry-level single processor server as a building block for high-performance computing clusters and applications.
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OpenSSI Clusters for Linux Leverages HP's NonStop Clusters for Unixware and various open source technologies to provide a full, highly-available SSI (Single System Image) clustering environment for Linux. Goals include availability, scalability and manageability.New features include several CFS performance enhancements and the integration of LVS-NAT. POSIX process groups and multi-threaded applications can now atomically migrate as a group. Also, processes can migrate while holding file record locks. New commands include 'fast' and 'fastnode'. Several files have been added to /proc/cluster for dynamic modification of nodedown detection parameters. Finally, a variety of bugs have been fixed.   OpenSSI 1.1.0 is a development release, and is not necessarily suitable for production use. The Red Hat 9 version should only be used for upgrading from OpenSSI 1.0.0. New installs should be done on Fedora Core 2 or Debian.  You can find our latest release here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=32541&package_id=131632
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By Brad Hem, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 18--An engineering team at HP had figured out how to squeeze a faster and more powerful computer server into one-third the traditional space. That was supposed to be the hard part.
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Device features two optical drives and a 160GB hard drive for storing content.
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Clustering, or grid-server configurations, have matured, with built-in capabilities that have taken out some of the intimidating factors inherent in the system topology. As a result, clustering has become more practical for a broader range of I.T. applications and sectors.
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Tinkerer Iain Sharp couldn't bear to part with his first computer -- a Mac SE/30 -- so he turned it into a powerful media server using a mini PC motherboard and a software emulator. By Leander Kahney.
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In their weekly technology column for ABC News, Jonathan Blum and Dan Evans indicate that âthe latest version of Appleâs iMac desktop definitely deserves to be one of our picks of the week. It is impressive from both a technical and design standpoint.â iMac, they say offers âa tasteful combo of black and gray aluminum that will make even the dullest cubicle or home office look cool.â Whatâs more, they believe that any consumer âlooking to get going in the home media network thingâthat is, storing and routing music and movies to TV screens around the home using a digital networkâshould consider the new iMac.â
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Company shows off labor-saving data center technology at Palo Alto research lab.
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CLOUDCROFT, N.M. - An observatory being refurbished near Cloudcroft is getting a new mission - providing telescope time for budding astronomers around the world.