Orion Workstations Act as Single-Box Clusters
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A startup company is rolling out a family of workstations aimed at the technical computing space that offer clusterlike capabilities inside a single box.
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Start-up Orion Multisystems believes it has found the key to open a new chapter for workstation technology: The company offers 12- and 96-node cluster
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This whitepaper will provide information on using Veritas&trade; Cluster Server to increase application availability in a cost-effective way. It will provide an overview of the history of clustering solutions in the open systems market and detail how Veritas clustering differs from other solutions in the control of larger, more cost-effective clusters.
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AUGUST 30, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - A new company thinks it has the answer for scientists and engineers looking for high-performance computing on the desktop.
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The price of the ft4400 is far higher than that of a clustered solution, Infoworld's reviewer says. But if your goal is a completely fault-tolerant single-server, Linux-based solution, he says, look no further.
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The OpenSSI project is a comprehensive clustering solution offering a full, highly available SSI environment for Linux. Goals for OpenSSI Clusters include availability, scalability and manageability, built from standard servers.   The full list of features are at http://wiki.openssi.org/go/Features  This release fixes a number of bugs affecting the HA-CFS cluster filesystem, VPROC process  management, and HA-LVS IP load-balancer.  Also the kernel is no longer using 4K stacks by default to simplify DRBD installation without kernel recompile.  Thanks to all the OpenSSI developers, contributors, and beta testers for their hard work leading up to this 2.0 preview release.  Release notes at http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=565029&group_id=32541  You can download this release at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=32541&package_id=154064&release_id=565029
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SAN FRANCISCO Today the idea of building a custom-designed workstation computer in Silicon Valley seems quaint. In both engineering and scientific markets, inexpensive off-the-shelf systems, coupled with the
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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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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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Most all-in-one desktops with LCD panels (the Sony VAIO and Gateway Profile systems come to mind) are two units permanently connected together: the part of the case housing the motherboard and drives, and the monitor.
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Mac and Windows machines can coexist nicely -- when it comes to systems management tasks, anyway. Ryan Faas gives his take each tool's strengths and weaknesses.
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Dell has teamed up with cluster-management app-maker Platform Computing Inc. to create a small but powerful rack-mounted server complete with open-source cluster-management tools.
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Ziff Davis - Adlink releases an ETX form-factor single-board computer with embedded Linux support for Intel Celeron and Pentium processors
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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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By Woods, Lynn; Kahn, Kathy  Remember the days when computers were giant mainframes housed in garage-sized rooms at big companies? There may be a lesson in that model certainly a market, as Symbio Technologies has discovered.
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Im in ur base processing ur Java Azul Systems is rolling out a new generation of Java-crunching appliances armed with the ability to spread its workload across a total of 768 processing cores in a single box.â¦
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All-in-one machine at Intel confab bears resemblance to new Apple PC. Also: High-tech sandwich boards?