Researchers tout 'wimpy nodes' for Net computing by Stephen Shankland

Technology News (Oct 20 2009) Power and Cooling , Servers

1. Mainstream servers are growing increasingly brawny with multicore processors and tremendous memory capacity, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh think 98-pound weaklings of the computing world might be better suited for many of the jobs on the Internet today. This first-generation FAWN system has an array of boards, each with its own processor, flash memory card, and network connection. (Credit: Carnegie Mellon University) The alternative the researchers advocate is named FAWN, short for Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes. It's described in a paper just presented at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. In short, the researchers believe some work can be managed with lower expense and lower power consumption using a cluster of servers built with lower-end processors and flash memory than with a general-purpose server. (Read Full Article)

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