Military Data Center In a Suitcase To Get Commercial Release 90
judgecorp writes: The Mobyl Data Center, designed for the US Department of Defense, puts a data center in a rugged suitcase-sized box, and it will shortly be available commercially. The box includes up to 88 Xeon cores a maximum of 176 GB of RAM, and 2.8 TB of SSD storage with 12TB of hard disk as an option. The system uses credit-card sized MobylPC server units, sealed in epoxy, and rated to survive 300g of shock, but apparently proprietary to the vendor, Arnouse Digital Devices Corp.
Atoms....not Xeons. (Score:3, Informative)
Correction. The article got it wrong too. [E3845]
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Correction. The article got it wrong too. [E3845]
That makes more sense, I couldn't figure out how they were cooling 88 Xeon cores encased in epoxy inside a briefcase. Even the Atom's must pose cooling challenge, but not quite as much as Xeon's.
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Atoms pump out very little heat, the ones I've seen in laptops just have passive cooling, and they're even installed in some tablets.
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Of course, you also get a 12 cubic foot backpack filled with batteries to keep it running for 30 minutes...
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Finally, I've found my new laptop...
It's about time they stopped trying to make every portable super-light and virtually powerless!
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Each card has 2 PCIe x1 buses coming out so if you hade a host machine that had a PCIe slot, then you could run a modern GPU. Maybe even with SLI/Crossfire although I'm not sure if that's reliant on having more PCIe bandwidth. The only issue would be the degradation in bandwidth going to the card as you would be going from something like x16 (or x8 or or x4) down to x1.
VM farm seedlings? (Score:2)
VM farm seedlings, I take it?
On a real note, it is an interesting application using a bunch of small form factor servers. I wonder if there is a switch between each of the nodes, so they can communicate between each other faster than 1-10GB.
Bunker-buster? (Score:5, Insightful)
Powering on these 88 Xeons sealed in Epoxy will take care of those pesky underground bunkers better than a nuke.
Re:Bunker-buster? (Score:5, Informative)
The chips themselves (E3845, a very low power-consuming model) only consume 10W [cpu-world.com] each, and it's 88 cores (not processors), each processor having 4 cores, so 22 processors consuming 220W. Assumedly these boards are designed for minimal power consumption and provide only a bare minimum of capabilities. The hard drives are SSD, so minimal power consumption there. There doesn't appear to be any sort of graphics, so no power consumption needed for that. RAM isn't usually a big power consumer. So I don't see any reason to think that the system is going to be consuming vast amounts of power. Maybe about the same total as a high-end gaming PC (but with a *lot* more computing power).
On the other hand, with epoxy-encased hardware, I am quite curious as to how they're handling cooling. I'm guessing that while the boards are embedded in epoxy that the surfaces of the processors aren't? And I'd wager that the processors are linked up to a common heat sink, as it'd make no sense to give each one its own fan. Hmm, if they're all connected to the same big chunk of aluminum or copper running all the way through, then it could double as a structural element. Neat. :)
Beyond all of this, the system is battery powered, so we're not looking at any "surge" at all. It's designed for 8 hours of usage at full power or a week of standby. The difference between the two says to me that they do a lot to power down hardware when it's not in use. Also, that battery alone probably weighs about 10-20kg** - although size-wise it's probably only 5-10 liters**, so it should fit fine.
You know, the more I look at these numbers, the more I think it all pans out. You're talking a big, heavy suitcase, but nonetheless, a suitcase.
** - assuming 8h@250-500W@200Wh/kg@400Wh/L or comparable.
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> I am quite curious as to how they're handling cooling
Open the suitcase lid?
I'll see myself out.
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Yes, the summary is apparently wrong. They're atoms, not Xeons. TDP varies a lot among Xeons, but a reasonably recent quad core one is going to be around 100 watts. 22 of those plus support hardware would make for a very warm suitcase.
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pedant point: a 2.5" SSD consumes just as much, if not more, power than a spinny.
The only physical difference between the two is that one has mechanical moving parts while the other does not.
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Keep one of those host machines at work and one at home setup as a thin client so you can carry your core back and forth to work. Slide it into a host machine, it starts up near instantly because of the SSD and then brings up your remote workspace or even use it as an actual workstation although not sure how quick an Atom is for that. At work, you wouldn't need your own computer so if your company does hotel desks, you have a lot less to carry around. The host machine could just be one of those monitors the
Intel E3845 Xeon processor? (Score:5, Informative)
What is a Intel E3845 Xeon processor?
the closest thing I found is Intel® Atom Processor E3845 (Bay Trail)
http://ark.intel.com/products/78475/Intel-Atom-Processor-E3845-2M-Cache-1_91-GHz
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THIS! I don't believe it is a XEON core, it is ATOM core. Eight hours on battery? This cries ATOM.
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(wait... what?)
Never Mind...
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Yah I call BS on the Xeon claim.
If it's the Atom processor, the math adds up. It has 4 cores and supports 8GB of RAM which matches up with the 88 core / 176 GB RAM numbers.
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What is a Intel E3845 Xeon processor?
the closest thing I found is Intel® Atom Processor E3845 (Bay Trail) http://ark.intel.com/products/... [intel.com]
The older version of the card is indeed an atom processor: BioDigital PC [deployable...logies.com]. I can't find anything indicating what the CPU type is in the latest, but I am guessing the BioDigital 7 [deployable...logies.com] also uses an Atom processor.
I will say that I have an Ivy Bridge Xeon processor that has a max TDP of 45W. In a fanless configuration, with an SSD, my average power consumption is 8W. I've never gotten it above 15W. This is with multiple VMs running, though I haven't tried to intentionally push it to its limits using something l
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BioDigital 7 are amd 2 or 4 core processors with GPUs
http://www.deployabletechnolog... [deployable...logies.com]
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Communism is INSTITUTIONALIZED cronyism
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The war against drugs. It will never stop.
The war against terrorism. It will never stop.*
* I'd like to see some Swordfish-style ass-kicking against terrorists.
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The war against drugs. It will never stop.
The war against terrorism. It will never stop.*
* I'd like to see some Swordfish-style ass-kicking against terrorists.
Nonsense, any day now our troops will be marching in and occupying the capital city of the nation of "terrorism" and... oh, wait. Well, ok, any day now our glorious army will be conquering the capital city of the nation of "drugs" and their leaders will be forced to surren... oh, crap.
Ideas are sure hard to fight aren't they? It's so much easier to invade nations with capitals you can occupy and governments you can get rid of...
I understand why they need all that power (Score:4, Interesting)
they are running the latest version of systemd!
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they are running the latest version of systemd!
psst. The systemd comments are getting to be right up there with the golden girls, the hostfile guy, and the cows go moo critter.
If ya gotta do that, you should post it AC, ya know?
Re: I understand why they need all that power (Score:1)
The hostfile guy? Care to share?
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No! Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!
Sorry, I thought you said "hostile."
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The hostfile guy? Care to share?
Haven't you seen his posts? He goes on a rant about that every so often. Long long rants.
We're living dangerously just chatting about him lest he strike us down with his bullshit.
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I have observed and poked him. He is mostly harmless and a bit zealous about the hosts file. I dare say he almost sort of makes us what is the Slashdot culture. Not him, by himself, of course but him as an inclusion of all of us. I was, at one point, going to email him a suggestion for his application but I decided it would be a waste of time - not for him but for the feature I had in mind. He is not much "worse" than the rest of us on any one of a number of given subjects. Then again, I like poking people
Cooling? (Score:1)
Any processor, much less Xenons, in Epoxy is going to get hot. Like, the epoxy is going to melt hot.
Even without the epoxy, that's a huge power profile in a small space. How exactly are they going to cool that?
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Any processor, much less Xenons, in Epoxy is going to get hot. Like, the epoxy is going to melt hot. Even without the epoxy, that's a huge power profile in a small space. How exactly are they going to cool that?
It is called conductive cooling...
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Even if you ignore the thermally conductive epoxies somebody else mentioned, simple.
Before you resin-pot the boards, you put a water-cooling heat exchanger on the chip and pipe the coolant to a radiator outside the epoxy block. Or if the thermal profile is low enough, you can do it with passive heat pipes like those inside my laptop.
Business in a box (Score:5, Interesting)
I can see many uses for this. Here in the midwest, where tornadoes are common, insurance companies often provide a business a discount if they physically harden their data centers. If one was to rebuild their infrastructure on one of these devices, and store it securely, I wonder if that would qualify?
Price? (Score:2)
What is the pricing on these things? (base or standard configuration)
I would imagine they could be an attractive option for business continuity planning, but personally as a compact, tidy and suitable for global field deployment so that in the field operations don't have to be restricted by real-time networking limitations via cellular or satellite communications, where all requests are relayed back to conventional data centres.
Why would you need a mobile data center? (Score:1, Interesting)
Why would you need a mobile data center? I can understand a mobile server, but if you think you need a mobile data center, maybe you don't understand the concept of "data center".
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No reliable connectivity in many parts of the world; if you need to do processing there, you need an option, and this is it.
Mineral extraction companies, survey companies, military operations, all sorts of industries could make use of something like this.
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I'm sure the $$ wouldn't be all that great, though. You better *really need* that processing power.
I thought this would be useful... (Score:2)
... until I realized that it doesn't have enough storage to serve my local porn stash.
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I have not had a porn stash in, like, ten years or more. Hell, for a while I was on dialup in that time and I still did not have a porn stash. Hell, I was on satellite and did not have a porn stash. There is just so much porn that, and I will save the whole fucking internet - it is bad, I just can not see any reason to save any. I have Windows executables older than most of the people here - cryptically named "Setup.exe" which is really helpful in deciding why I saved that file from 1998. But no, I have no
Typo, right? (Score:2)
and rated to survive 300g of shock
surely it must be 300kg?
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Ah. 300G. That makes more sense.
Military data center in a suitcase? (Score:1)
Da power (Score:1)
Yea, that's great server density. But how are you going to power it? Can it run off of a standard 15/20amp Edison? What about other power standards? Yea, it is powerful, compact, and portable but if you can't power in many locations, it an expensive door stop.
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It runs on a hot-swapable battery system. The specs say 8 hours at 100% usage and a week on standby for one battery which is pretty good since if you are carrying this into the field, you can afford to carry a few more fully charged batteries with you or just have a small generator.
An Intel E3845 has a TDP of 10W so assuming peak power is 1.5 x TDP, then this would draw 15W as 100% power usage. There are 22 of these devices so there is a total of 330W dedicated to just the CPUs. There is no GPU, SSDs take u
Beowulf cluster, anyone? (Score:2)
Am I the only one struggling to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? What's /. coming to?
Anticipating This Headline (Score:1)
Breaking News: OPM Portable data center lost at airport. Was your data compromised, more at 11.