Was looking through my office window at the data closet and (due to angle, objects, field of view) could only see one server light cluster out of the 6 racks full. And thought it would be nice to scale everything down to 2U. Then day-dreamed about a future where a warehouse data center was reduced to a single hypercube sitting alone in the vast darkness.
The other use case was for hosting companies. They could sell “5 servers” to one customer and “10 servers” to another and have full CPU/memory isolation. I think that use case still exists and we see it used all over the place in public cloud hyperscalers.
Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are a good argument for discrete servers like this. We’ll see if a new generation of CPUs will make this more worth it.
128-192 cores on a single epyc makes almost nothing worth it, the scaling is incredible.
Also, I happen to know they’re working on even more hardware isolation mechanisms, similar to sriov but more enforced.
Sure, which is why we haven’t seen a huge adoption. However, in some cases it isn’t so much an issue of total compute power, its autonomy. If there’s a rogue process running on one of those 192 cores and it can end up accessing the memory in your space, its a problem. There are some regulatory rules I’ve run into that actually forbid company processes on shared CPU infrastructure.
There are, but at that point you’re probably buying big iron already, cost isn’t an issue.
Sun literally made their living from those applications for a long while.