I want option 3. A 4U rack with 32 completely isolated embedded stand alone quad core ARM or PPC systems, a network switch and an FPGA on each connected to the switch fabric.
Then we can start doing some interesting stuff past finding new ways to chop computers up.
Very interesting, that would be something I'd buy just to mess around with, I can think of a few ways in which I'd use it right off the bat and if you give me couple of hours more I'll have a whole raft of them :)
You could but I want standard storage per node (PCI-E FLASH), redundant PSUs and the TDP of a hefty FPGA going flat out is a lot larger than that of the ARM core.
Comments
I want option 3. A 4U rack with 32 completely isolated embedded stand alone quad core ARM or PPC systems, a network switch and an FPGA on each connected to the switch fabric.
Then we can start doing some interesting stuff past finding new ways to chop computers up.
Very interesting, that would be something I'd buy just to mess around with, I can think of a few ways in which I'd use it right off the bat and if you give me couple of hours more I'll have a whole raft of them :)
That does not sound very high density compared to what you can get from a company like Baserock - http://www.baserock.com/servers
I want a hefty FPGA attached to the CPU bus and switch backplane. That will take a lot more power than the ARM core.
32 ARM chips in 4U seems very low to me, just in terms of the TDP a 4U rack is able to dissipate at present. You could increase density a lot.
You could but I want standard storage per node (PCI-E FLASH), redundant PSUs and the TDP of a hefty FPGA going flat out is a lot larger than that of the ARM core.