Comment on Data centers will look ridiculous with tiny future servers.

• partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      128-192 cores on a single epyc makes almost nothing worth it, the scaling is incredible.

      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.

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      • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        There are, but at that point you’re probably buying big iron already, cost isn’t an issue.

        Sun literally made their living from those applications for a long while.

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• MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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

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    • MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Agreed.

      Highlighting how often software usability reduces adoption of good ideas.

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