Dave Andersen’s FAWN in Technology Review
It is now well-known that power is a big problem for operating large data centers. Companies pay huge amounts of money for the energy to power and cool their server clusters, and the negative impact on the environment caused by this energy load is surprisingly high. So can we do better? David Andersen and his team have been studying this issue, experimenting with alternative server architectures that achieve order-of-magnitude better performance per watt of energy, at least for the kinds of web service loads that companies like Amazon and Facebook experience.
Called FAWN, for “Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes”, the server design uses an array of extremely low-power CPUs (the kind used in embedded systems), flash memory, and some smart software to achieve high performance with low power — each node able to handle 700 data-lookup queries per second in under 4 watts.
Check out the nice article in Technology Review that has just come out about this. And, of course, FAWN has just been Slashdotted as well.
Peter Lee @ April 17, 2009
Another very good article, very usefull!!
This is very usefull information!
thank you very much!