fawn

Researchers tout 'wimpy nodes' for Net computing

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.

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. And these days, with green technology in vogue and power costs no longer an afterthought, efficient computing is a big deal.

"We were looking at efficiency at sub-maximum load. We realized the same techniques could serve high loads more efficiently as well," said David Andersen, the Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of computer science who helped lead the project. … Read more