“Server compute farms are making their way into large manufacturing environments for electronic design automation and to more quickly process and complete tasks. A server farm accomplishes this by harnessing computing power from multiple machines and combining that power.

The idea of teaming the processors of server systems into a single network entity and extracting the computation resources from them has long been popular in research and academic institutions. Now it's gaining favor in commercial enterprises.

Load-sharing software is the crux of any compute farm. It tracks demands for processing power from different machines, prioritizes the tasks, and schedules and reschedules them. When demand decreases, low priority jobs run; when demand is high, only the most important tasks run.

Users submit jobs to the load-sharing software, rather than to individual systems, and indicate the priority of the job. The software matches the job to the servers or workstations most capable of handling it and schedules the job for execution. Server farms are able to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, utilizing processing power that would otherwise sit idle.

Several vendors are involved in commercial computer farm development. Among them are Blackstone Technology Group, Compaq and Sun Microsystems. Among the consumer projects using compute farms is SETI@home, which uses the computation resources of individuals' workstations to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

One compute farm within Sun Microsystems, for example, contains 600 multiprocessor UltraSPARC systems, 2,000 UltraSPARC CPUs, 500 gigabytes of RAM and 11 terabytes of disk space. In a single week, the server farm will execute over a billion cycles for 15 to 20 different tasks”.

I know that the Sun specs look weak in comparison to what is done today in a robust Cloud environment, but back in 2000, those were very impressive numbers. At the time, the members of Asset Conversion Services were supplying Sun Microsystems work stations and servers to Cisco, Phillips,  Quantum, National Semiconductor, Cadence, Symantec and a host of fortune 500 companies. ACS knew that we would have to watch this new development very carefully as we did not want to get left in the dust because we failed to acknowledge the changing technology landscape. So our feelers were up at ACS and we were watching this trend with real interest. Luckily for Asset Conversion Services we did not see a drop off of our business as it seemed that even though Sun was an early adapter, the industry as a whole were not jumping ship to embrace this new way of computing, however the writing was on the wall.

During this time another technology was emerging…. ‘SAN’ technology and companies like EMC were exploiting this new way of harnessing information.  This new technology was so transformational, I think it actually took some attention away from server farms and allowed Asset Conversion Services some breathing space to take advantage of confusion.

ACS got on the bandwagon went on a 14 city tour teaching early adapters how to build a Storage Area Network using a real SAN (which had never been done). We did this for two reasons, first we wanted to build relationships with companies we have not done business with before and secondly we wanted to be on the forefront of a game changer like SAN, since the technology was clearly superior to NAS and still is to this day.

As all this was going on computer farms and companies like Sun Microsystems   were starting to get some traction with the technology.  As more and more companies started to move their compute intensive jobs to the computer farms Asset Conversion Services decided it was time to accommodate this new computing paradigm.

Stay tuned for Chapter 2…Up in the Clouds

This article was brought to you buy Asset Conversion Services, where your computing needs are taken care of.  Asset Conversion Services specializes in upgrades for new and used Sun, HP and IBM servers.  Currently ACS has had the opportunity to address both the past with the present in its ability to upgrade Sun M4000 and Sun M5000 with the 64 GB memory option.

Sun no longer has the 64 GB memory option available for the M4000/M5000, part number: (SELX2D1P (8 x 8GB DIMMs 371-4476) and the SELX2D1Z (8 x 8GB DIMMs and the Memory Board 541-0545). The M4000/M5000 is a currently manufactured hardware server from Sun/Oracle. The fact that Asset Conversion Services is capable of supplying a Sun Original memory option for a current Sun Microsystems server says a lot about the resourcefulness of Asset Conversion Services.