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11/16/2005: "Your future linux box"

10Gbps Ethernet is making good progress lately. Fulcrum has a 24-port switch chip and both Vativ and KeyEye have Cat6 PHYs. Fulcrum claims 200ns latency and 1.2Tbps internal throughput, so essentially its switch-fabric is non-blocking except in the most constrained of cirucumstances.

10Gbps Ethernet over copper is currently limited to 15 meters (50 feet).

Chelsio's T210-CX 10Gbps Ethernet NIC is $795, and runs under Linux. They have been independently verified to deliver 7.9 Gbps throughput while using only 50% of a single server CPU... and Chelsio will continue to halve prices every 12 months .... So in three years, you'll find several sub-$100 10Gbps Ethernet NICs on the market.

Meanwhile, AMD has announced Quad core Opteron on its roadmap for delivery in 2007.

What does the "world's fastest linux box" look like in 2007? Likely a 32-way Opteron connected to 23 others via 10Gbps Ethernet, all running some whacked version of Xen and a single linux system image.
Thats 768 CPUs in a half-rack, for those of you counting at home. If each of these machines has but a pair of 1TB drives (lets assume that drive density only doubles in the next two years) then you've got 48 TB of on-line storage.

Assuming that these machines cost $10K each, and that the switch is in the noise, the entire rack will set you back a cool $250,000. While out of reach for most households, this does fit into the budget of even a moderately-sized business, especially one that needs some serious CPU power. Moreover, it will make for an entirely new class of 'hosted linux' businesses. Using software technology that is already available today, (and will most certainly be mature in less than two years) a near-future "service provider" could sell you (and two thousand of your closest friends) access to this "server farm" for a mere $20 per month. Thats $40,000 of income, balanced against a less than $8,000 per month payment on the hardware, and perhaps another $3,000 per month of co-location and base bandwidth charges. (You'll pay for any overages, of course.)

This leaves a close-to 50% margin of $29,000 per month to pay the small number people required to administrate such a machine.

Now, if we could find a way to get GigE bandwidth out of our homes there would be a lot more demand pull for these kinds of mini-clusters.