Fitting A Linux Box On A PCI Card

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Running on Newsforge/Linux.com is a hardware review where Slashdot's Krow took a couple of OmniCluster's Slotservers and and built a cluster configuation inside of a singe host computer (and even had DB2 running on one of the card's inside of the host). Could something like this be the future of computing where for additional processing power you just kept adding additional computers inside of a host?"

Seen these for a long time

[ackthpt]

I've seen these around for ages, variety of manufacturers, but usually they're priced significantly higher than just buying several cheap PC's, granted you have a fast bus between cards/PC's, unless you have a redundant powersupply, one failure brings your whole cluster down, whereas networked mobos should be tolerant of one system failing. As for future, eh, they've been around long enough, but I expect the use has been rather specialized.

The SETI version

[Wire Tap]

Does anyone here remember a while back when that "fake" company tried to sell us SETI @ Home PCI cards? I was about to place my order, until the word came to me that they were a fraud. Kind of a funny joke at the time, though. At any rate, here is the old /. story on it:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/23/2158 22 6&mode=thread

It would have been GREAT to have an improvement in CPU speed on a PCI card, as I always have at least two free in every system I own. What I wonder, though, is what instructional speed would the PCI card "CPUs" give us?

Imagine a new kind of bus

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if all the devices in your computer were attached to each other with 100 GB optical cable.

Essentially there would be a switch that allowed about 32 devices to be attached.

The devices could be storage devices, processors, audio/video devices, or communication devices.

Storage devices would be things like memory, hard drives, cdroms and the like.

This bus would allow multiple processors to access the same device at the same time and would allow devices to communicate directly to each other, like allowing a program to be loaded directly from a hard drive into memory, or from a video capture device directly onto a hard drive.

No motherboard, just slots that held different form factor devices with power and optical wires attached.

A networking device would allow the internal protocol to be wrapped in IP and allow the interntal network to be bridged onto ethernet. This would allow the busses on seperate computers to work like a single computer. The processors on all the machines could easily network together, memory could be shared seamlessly, harddrive storage would be shared and kept backedup in real time. Any device in any machine could communicate directly with any other device in any other machine. Security allowing.

Want 20 processors in your machine? Install them.

Want 6 memory devices with 1GB each? Add them.

Want 100 desktop devices with only a network device, display device and input/output device that use the processor and storage out of an application server? No problem.

Want a box that seemlessly runs 20 different OSes each in a virtual machine that are ran across 10 boxes in a redundant failover system? No problem, it's all done in hardware.

Want the hard drives in all the desktop machines to act like one giant raid 5 to store all the companies data on? No problem. (1000 machines with 10 GB each is 10 TB of storage)

This is the future of computing.

Linux on PCI a year old, dudes!

[scaryjohn]

I looked at this and said... wait a minute, hasn't this already been sorta done [slashdot.org]? Despite not being a full featured box, Firecard [merilus.com] is a PCI-card running Linux... for the purposes of supporting a firewall (as you could have guessed from the name if you'd not read the story -- Nov 14 2001... but it's cool that they've taken it to the next level.

Re:G4 processor cards

[statusbar]

'Crushing numbers' is the right term, as g4's altivec is only single precision.

But it would be cool.

--jeff

wait a minute

[dakoda]

this is exactly what many good video cards do, but in a specialized manner. same with high end sound etc. the idea of putting powerful cpu's on cards is probably as ancient as cards themselves.

as has been noted before, this would really be useful if the pci bus was extended (faster/wider). of course, making it faster/wider gives you what sgi has been doing for a while too (also mentioned above).

perhaps the most dissapointing thing is that all that power goes to waste on users playing solitare, running windows, aol, and quake, not on something that will actually need the power to perform the tasks. well, maybe quake isnt so bad...