It only been 8 days since the project was announced Now Dave has a machine booting.


[ T: NiagaraCMT CoolThreads Linux ]

I mentioned on the OpenSolaris site that commercial NAS devices charge between $1.60 to $3.00 per GigaByte without redundancy. That is 0.33 to 0.62 GigaBytes per dollar. From two web sites I got prices in January 2006 for 30 hard drives.




A more interesting way to measure Hard Disk value is GigaBytes per Dollar



Assuming that the GB per $ performance of hard drives can be represented as a quadratic we get
the red dotted line.

lm(formula = Size/Price ~ Size + I(Size^2), data = mytable)

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max
-0.36294 -0.14051  0.02323  0.13648  0.38674

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept)  6.514e-01  1.517e-01   4.295 0.000202 ***
Size         1.173e-02  1.169e-03  10.030 1.33e-10 ***
I(Size^2)   -2.052e-05  2.030e-06 -10.107 1.13e-10 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 0.1907 on 27 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-Squared: 0.7923,     Adjusted R-squared: 0.7769
F-statistic:  51.5 on 2 and 27 DF,  p-value: 6.093e-10

Solving the quadratic we get the best price performing hard drive would  be 286GB, sadly nobody makes such a drive but by eyeballing the graph the sweet spot is between 250GB to 320GB with a price performance above 2GB per dollar. Giving us a reasonable margin to build our OpenSolaris Appliance and still beat the comercial products 0.33 to 0.62 GigaBytes per dollar.


[ T: OpenSolaris Qube ]

Talking to folks about building a new home computer after the initial tricky but quickly resolved problem of which CPU do you want to use. Comes storage, I'm talking internal hard drives. There is so much choice in the marketplace at the moment. Do you choose PATA (new name for ATA) or SATA? What about MTBF, power consumption, noise etc. What size is best 80GB up to 500GB all seem plausible sizes but where is the sweet spot?

So my goal is have fun putting together an OpenSolaris  high performance low cost NAS appliance and finding way to measure to see if it really is high performance and low cost.

Economics of PC Storage part 2 - Hard Disks


[ T: OpenSolaris Qube ]

This comment came from a blog I'm not sure if it was deliberate FUD or the author was just not aware that in today's world the old rules of thumb are no longer relevant.

Today almost all business applications are either multi-threaded or multi-process [firefox, apache, oracle, mysql, postgress, java, ...] So you are more interested in the performance of many threads than a single thread. The old thinking is cache misses are bad do anything to reduce cache misses build a bigger cache, keep other cores away from this cache because when we have a cache miss the processor will stall and that will reduce performance. The real problem is not cache misses but processor stalls. The T1 has 4 hardware threads per core so when we have a cache miss it can work on another thread, the processor doesn't stall. So does the T1 have more cache misses than other processors – maybe, does it reduce the performance of the T1 – No. More theory here more practice here.

[ T: NiagaraCMT CoolThreads CPU ]

David Miller tells all here.

[ T: NiagaraCMT CoolThreads Linux ]

A new piece of hardware appeared on a local street light pole.

It looks to be part of google's plan to setup free WiFi. I went looking for a google wifi faq but couldn't find one, but I did find this blog. The first questions that come to mind is will it be better than DSL or cable, what bandwidth is available both up and down. What are the economics of this for google and for the city. Will people throw away their mobile phones and use skype devices while in silicon valley?

[ T: WiFi ]

Well I don't speak for AMD, Intel or Sun for that matter but I have some comments regarding the questions here.

I'm sure it possible to make a lower electrical power Ultrasparc with less cores or slower clock or make a higher compute power version with even more cores  or faster clock, If you wanted to model or make one yourself the chip design tools and specs to do it are here.

While The  UltraSparc T1 has 8 cores and 4 threads per core giving 32 hardware threads  and no other commercially available chip comes close to it. It is more important to think of the whole system it will used in like I blogged before here, So once you see the final product you can see the reasons why the other choices were made.

If your interested in the AMD space we've used the same design criteria, and as Marc Andreessen discussed here (the numbers are here) its the most cost efficient solution.

[ T: OpenSolaris AMD Intel Linux Solaris ]