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paulie Femto
Into the dark
Join date: 13 Sep 2003
Posts: 1,098
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03-28-2006 19:38
Hey, Linden Lab. Azul makes 24 core, and soon 48 core, processors. How would you like to fill your data center with these bad boys? http://www.azulsystems.com/products/nap.htmlI bet you could buy a few of these with your shiny, new $11 million dollars, eh?  From what I read about Azul's hardware and software, the idea is to use the massive SMP to accellerate VM's like JAVA or LSL. Azul's software is a platform-agnostic application accellerator, designed to make Java apps (or any other VM app optimized for multithreading) go like crazy. It does for processing power what a storage server does for disk space. Plug an Azul box into your grid of servers and it takes over as a massive VM assist. It runs a gazillion threads for the VM's living on your general purpose servers. Think LSL and any other VM's accellerated to infinity and beyond.
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REUTERS on SL: "Thirty-five thousand people wearing their psyches on the outside and all the attendant unfettered freakishness that brings."
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Adam Zaius
Deus
Join date: 9 Jan 2004
Posts: 1,483
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03-28-2006 19:56
I doubt it would help much. The server software is still single threaded.
Most of this stuff is for things which are highly parallelisable, like scientific computing.
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Osgeld Barmy
Registered User
Join date: 22 Mar 2005
Posts: 3,336
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03-28-2006 22:53
i would rather see them get a grid of cray X1e's (since were dreaming) 18GFLOP's per cpu 34 GB per second memory access per cpu 147,456 TeraFlops with 64 units (thats 8,192 cpu's) yea that might make a dent in asset server performance http://www.cray.com/downloads/X1E_datasheet.pdf |
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Cottonteil Muromachi
Abominable
Join date: 2 Mar 2005
Posts: 1,071
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03-28-2006 23:52
This is like putting a powerful engine in a car that has no wheels to run on.
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Eata Kitty
Registered User
Join date: 21 Jan 2005
Posts: 387
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03-29-2006 02:14
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Mack Echegaray
Registered Snoozer
Join date: 15 Dec 2005
Posts: 145
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03-29-2006 03:21
Optimizing the sims so they don't use CPU time when nobody is around to experience them might be a better way forward (with a way to override that on a per-script/object level if for some reason you wanted the sim to run 24/7).
Statistical multiplexing could then be used to increase the number of sims on the grid without increasing the number of machines in use (ie, sims that have very little activity are stacked with other low activity sims, reallocated on-the-fly)
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