Was looking through my office window at the data closet and (due to angle, objects, field of view) could only see one server light cluster out of the 6 racks full. And thought it would be nice to scale everything down to 2U. Then day-dreamed about a future where a warehouse data center was reduced to a single hypercube sitting alone in the vast darkness.

  • @[email protected]
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    43 months ago

    It made some sense before virtualization for job separation.

    Then docker/k8s came along and nuked everything from orbit.

    • partial_accumen
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      23 months ago

      The other use case was for hosting companies. They could sell “5 servers” to one customer and “10 servers” to another and have full CPU/memory isolation. I think that use case still exists and we see it used all over the place in public cloud hyperscalers.

      Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are a good argument for discrete servers like this. We’ll see if a new generation of CPUs will make this more worth it.

      • @[email protected]
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        43 months ago

        128-192 cores on a single epyc makes almost nothing worth it, the scaling is incredible.

        Also, I happen to know they’re working on even more hardware isolation mechanisms, similar to sriov but more enforced.

        • partial_accumen
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          13 months ago

          128-192 cores on a single epyc makes almost nothing worth it, the scaling is incredible.

          Sure, which is why we haven’t seen a huge adoption. However, in some cases it isn’t so much an issue of total compute power, its autonomy. If there’s a rogue process running on one of those 192 cores and it can end up accessing the memory in your space, its a problem. There are some regulatory rules I’ve run into that actually forbid company processes on shared CPU infrastructure.

          • @[email protected]
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            13 months ago

            There are, but at that point you’re probably buying big iron already, cost isn’t an issue.

            Sun literally made their living from those applications for a long while.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      VMs were a thing in 2013.

      Interestinly, Docker was released in March 2013. So it might have prevented a better company from trying the same thing.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        Yes, but they weren’t as fast, vt-x and the like were still fairly new, and the VM stacks were kind of shit.

        Yeah, docker is a shame, I wrote a thin stack on lxc, but BSD Jails are much nicer, if only they improved their deployment system