Comment on Data centers will look ridiculous with tiny future servers.
MNByChoice@midwest.social 3 weeks agoThat did not catch on. I had access to one and the use case and deployment docs were foggy at best
Comment on Data centers will look ridiculous with tiny future servers.
MNByChoice@midwest.social 3 weeks agoThat did not catch on. I had access to one and the use case and deployment docs were foggy at best
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It made some sense before virtualization for job separation.
Then docker/k8s came along and nuked everything from orbit.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The other use case was for hosting companies. They could sell “5 servers” to one customer and “10 servers” to another and have full CPU/memory isolation. I think that use case still exists and we see it used all over the place in public cloud hyperscalers.
Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are a good argument for discrete servers like this. We’ll see if a new generation of CPUs will make this more worth it.
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
128-192 cores on a single epyc makes almost nothing worth it, the scaling is incredible.
Also, I happen to know they’re working on even more hardware isolation mechanisms, similar to sriov but more enforced.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Sure, which is why we haven’t seen a huge adoption. However, in some cases it isn’t so much an issue of total compute power, its autonomy. If there’s a rogue process running on one of those 192 cores and it can end up accessing the memory in your space, its a problem. There are some regulatory rules I’ve run into that actually forbid company processes on shared CPU infrastructure.
MNByChoice@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
VMs were a thing in 2013.
Interestinly, Docker was released in March 2013. So it might have prevented a better company from trying the same thing.
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes, but they weren’t as fast, vt-x and the like were still fairly new, and the VM stacks were kind of shit.
Yeah, docker is a shame, I wrote a thin stack on lxc, but BSD Jails are much nicer, if only they improved their deployment system
MNByChoice@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Agreed.
Highlighting how often software usability reduces adoption of good ideas.