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A comment on Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems. Parent comment

Re:Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Te... by rbanffy on Thursday March 22, 2018 @06:23PM (#16653258)
They are still useful though. If you want to build an 7-node cluster of 2GB nodes on a single Mini ITX motherboard, it's even cheap. And requires no messy cables.

https://www.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard-with-7-module-s...

and seven https://www.pine64.org/?product=sopine-a64

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Re:Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Te... by planteen on Thursday March 22, 2018 @07:24PM (#16653668)
That's neat. I had heard of the PINE64 board but never the SOPINE. Curious, have you implemented any projects on this? Seems like it might be neat for testing a small distributed system.
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Re:Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Te... by rbanffy on Thursday March 22, 2018 @08:15PM (#16653959)
I'm still building a cluster of Pi Zeros connected via a USB hub. Since I'm doing it on my spare time, it's not going fast.

The point of clusters like this is not the speed, but the fact it's a cluster, with all the bottlenecks a cluster has.

On USB it seems I'll have to route all traffic between the nodes via the cluster controller, which will also serve the shared NFS volume.

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Re:Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Te... by imtringued on Friday March 23, 2018 @09:35AM (#16657899)
Those SBCs are still stuck with using very outdated SoCs usually with a quadcore A53. Even a 7 node cluster of SOPINEs is going to be slower than an iPhone X.
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Re:Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Te... by rbanffy on Friday March 23, 2018 @05:06PM (#16662634)
That's not the point. The point is that it's a cluster of network-connected nodes that can run something like Kubernetes.
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