Tuesday October 17, 2006

Today's Project Blackbox announcement got me thinking about big mobile datacenters. I'm thinking really big--like Suezmax big. What would be the total computational power of a container ship fully loaded with Project Blackbox units? I assume the ship would need a sizeable power plant for datacenter operations and propulsion. And that sea water could be used for heat exchange.

Estimates are that there are ships currently under development in the 15000 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units) range. Project Blackbox uses 1 TEU containers, so our Suezmax datacenter could include 15000 Project Blackbox units.

One could fit each container with a variety of payloads, but for the sake of our thought experiment, let's assume we use x64 servers and that 250 four-core servers will fit in a 1 TEU container. Further, assume conservatively that these are 2.5GHz Opteron processors. Doing the math to find the floating-point capability of our Suezmax datacenter, measured in FLOP/s (floating-point operations per second): Each core is capable of 5.0 GigaFLOP/s. Each container is therefore capable of 1000 x 5.0 GFLOP/s--let's call that 5.0 TeraFLOP/s. So our datacenter would have a peak performance rating of 15000 x 5 TFLOPs, or about 75 PetaFLOP/s. That's well over 100 times the performance of the world's current largest supercomputer. Not too shabby.

If instead we loaded each container with 250 Sun Fire CoolThreads T1000 servers, we'd have 8000 threads per container, for a total of 8000 x 15000 = 120 million simultaneous threads available in our Suezmax datacenter. Now that would be a web presence!

Of course this is not how one would build a datacenter of this size. But at smaller scales the virtues of mobile deployment, modularity, and customizability start to look more interesting for temporary datacenter expansions, for dropping IT infrastructure into zones of need, and for getting computation closer to data...