Musing: Hyperscale computing and us

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Wed Apr 17 15:41:38 UTC 2013


On Wed Apr 17 11:06:53 2013, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 02:50:54PM -0400, Matt Wagner wrote:
>> I had lunch yesterday with some people who happened to be pretty
>> familiar with this, and what's dubbed the "hyperscale" paradigm. The
>> idea is that, instead of some dense servers and running VMs on them,
>> you go for a massive number of very low-power servers. These Atoms
>> seem to use something in the ballpark of 10W, but there's also a lot
>> of interest in ARM chips where you can get much lower usage. And
>> apparently, 45 nodes in 4.3U is nothing. Look at HP's Redstone[2]
>> for example, which fit 288 ARM chips into a 4U chassis.
>
> FYI HP Moonshot will support other chip vendors by end of 13, as they
> promise (AMD, ARM...)

I've heard some really interesting anecdotes about the density that can 
be achieved with ARM chips. It would be interesting to see if things get 
even more dense going forward.

>> I think it's too soon to be able to do a lot, but I think this is
>> something worth thinking about. Can we effectively bring what we do
>> in the cloud to "hyperscale" physical nodes?
>
> There is already Foreman which handles bare-metal efficiently. Maybe it
> worths to integrate some more effort into the Foreman.

I think that could be a really interesting thing to do... Either with us 
integrating with Foreman directly, or trying to get a Foreman driver for 
Deltacloud, so that Deltacloud clients can think of it as a "bare metal 
cloud."

The Baremetal extension that Kevin Fox mentioned above is also really 
interesting -- making bare-metal servers appear behind the OpenStack API.

Between the two of those, it sounds like there is a lot we could do 
going forward.

-- Matt


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