Fitting A Linux Box On A PCI Card 137
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?"
G4 processor cards (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd just love the idea of having a host PC (or a Beowulf cluster of them ;-) with all the PCI slots filled with G4 7400 boards crushing numbers...
PCI card computers (Score:3, Interesting)
PCI = PCI = PCI = CPU = PCI = PCI ..
I I I I
IDE CPU CPU CPU
I I I
USB PCIs PCIs
I I
IDE
I
USB
I have left out memory controllers, northbridge, etc, and modern fancy chip interconnects because they are just fluff (no, not fluffers, that is another industry). In the above diagram, what is the host CPU? Is there actually such a thing as a host? The PCI bus is arguably the center of a modern PC, with CPUs and controllers hanging off of it.
Modern motherboards are just a restriction on what you can do in reality. Reality is a PCI backplane on a case, maybe with a couple of PCI-PCI bridges. You can then add anything into any PCI card that you want - normal PCI cards, or CPUs (NB, Memory, CPU, etc).
That is why you can configure these cards to use the 'host' IDE drive. It is just a device on every 'computer' within the case...
I can't post a diagram though, because I must use "fewer junk characters". Bloody lameness filter - affects the real users, the people it is meant to trap just work around it. Would you call this a "lame post"?
Re:Ob Beowulf comment (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/sa-beowulf/
Alas I think the project seems to be dead for some time now.
Re:Linux on PCI cards is the way forward. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Impractical (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think there will be a problem with interference. Check out these computers. [skycomputers.com] They use a similar system, but instead of being on a pidly motherboard, they use the ubiquitous VME format. They really pack in the processors -- 4 G4 PPC's per daughter card [skycomputers.com], and 4 daughter cards per single 9U VME card, and then 16 9U cards per chassis, and then three chassis. (4*4*16*3=48 TFLOPS) The pitch spacing on PCI is comprable to that on VME.
Also, I wondered about the connector on the tops of these boards. It looks like another PCI card edge. I wonder if this is a duplicate of the host PCI interface (for debug purposes), if it's a new "slot" to connect to the server's internal bus, or if it's a way to connect server cards bypassing the main PCI bus (for better performance).
Re:CPU Speed (Score:0, Interesting)
SUN has a similar product.. (Score:5, Interesting)
//Phizzy
Re:Imagine a new kind of bus (Score:3, Interesting)