| HotServer
Technologies.............. |
| . |
"We
chose SPARC as the first commercial implementation of our new technology,
because we thought this market would work better for us, as a small company with
limited marketing budgets, than the huge Wintel server market in which we would
be invisible" said Gunnar King, CEO of HotServer Tech. "But it's
equally feasible to use this technology to roll out a 6GHz Pentium Linux server.
If someone from Dell or IBM approaches us about a licensing deal, we would be
happy to discuss those opportunities." | |
| HotServer
Tech Announces 3GHz hotSPARC 9000 Rackmount Server |
Anchorage, AK - April 1, 2002 -
HotServer Technologies Inc., a stealth mode incubator company and subsidiary of
Gunnar Technologies AS (Sweden), today disclosed details of its forthcoming
hotSPARC 9000 Rackmount Server, which will be generally available in early May.
HotServer
Tech has been testing the new systems at a number of defense locations under non
disclosure agreements since the 3rd quarter of 2001, but delayed announcing the
new systems because of adverse market conditions in the computer industry at the
time.
"We think the market is now ready for our 3GHz hotSPARC
systems," said Ivan Sinkashipovitch, Chief Tehnology Officer. "We've
been developing the clock pulse modulation and heat pipe technology used in the
hotSPARC 9000 for 5 years, and because of concerns about
reliability and
field servicability of any new technology, we've done our testing the old
fashioned way, by measurement and field trials rather than just simulations."
The
company which started as a stealth mode incumbator in the mid 1990's, published
a business plan saying it was working on military and ruggedised systems for
seismic research. As a result they were able to buy SPARC chips from Texas
Instruments, Fujitsu and other companies as
raw dice, which they
retested and packaged to their own
military
specifications. The company declines to say which manfucturers chips they are
actually using, and when questioned about the yield for the new process, just
commented that "It's satisfactory."
The entry level hotSPARC
9000/8 has the following features:-
- 8 hotSPARC 64 bit processors clocked at 3GHz (50% duty cycle)
- 4G RAM per processor
- Interfaces:- 4 Infiniband
ports, 16 Fibre-channel
(via INRANGE switch), 4 Gigabit Ethernet, 2 SCSI, 2 x serial
- Storage:- customers can choose between HotServer Tech's own
solid state disk, or
Texas Memory Systems
RAM-SAN. The system can be supplied with
RAID systems from
LSI Logic Storage Systems,
or EMC by approved VARs of
those products who have signed up as hotSPARC resellers.
- Packaging:- processor and memory modules fit into a 4U rackmount.
- Operating systems:- 100% binary compatible with Solaris 8, 9, Linux etc
Price:-
$215,000 (4 processors with 8G RAM)
other pricing on request. Availability volume shipments will start in May.
Service:- HotServer Tech will be talking to a number of 3rd party maintenance
companies including IBM, NCR and Klix, about providing service options for these
systems. ...HotServer Tech profile
Editor's comments:- this is the first time since
Ross Technologies
launched their hyperSPARC upgrades in the early 1990's that
Sun Microsystems has been
outclassed by a competing systems company offering a faster SPARC processor.
I asked HotServer Tech what they thought Sun would do about their
new product. The company didn't want their comments to be quoted, but indicated
their hope that Sun could well become a reseller for the new product, or even
buy the company if it proved to be successful. | |
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"I'm
impressed by your new hotSPARC server" said Megabyte to Cheaperbyte . "Does
it make coffee too?"
"The more you drink, the faster it
goes." | |
Nibble:-
Re: hotSPARC technology.
It's long been known that a small
percentage of microprocessors can be run at much faster clock speeds than those
for which they are rated in commecial systems. But the problem is:- the faster
the clock speed, the hotter the chip runs, and extended operation at higher
speeds has previously been considered to be uneconomic, due to high cooling
costs, or unreliable because chips suffer from thermal stress. In the past
some companies have created special edition workstations which ran at higher
speeds using peltier effect heat sinks which cooled down the processor, but the
high cost has prevented these being used in manstream systems.
The
hotSPARC technology used by HotServer Tech came out of declassified programs run
by Soviet torpedo designers during the Cold War. In the 1980's the Soviets were
unable to buy very fast processor chips on the open market, and relied on
inferior home developed copies of popular chips such as the X86, PDP-11 and VAX
architectures. Using statistical sampling techniques the military found that
upto about 5% of the chips originally intended for commercial use could be run
at much higher speeds using a combination of variable speed pulse width
modulation of the processor clock, lower operating voltages and specially
designed heat pipes.
In torpedoes in particular, which have a short
operational life, the advantage of being able to run a processor at upto 2 or 3
times its normally rated clock speed reduces the weight of the targeting
systems, allowing more budget for fuel (range/speed) or payload (explosives).
The electronic systems in torpedoes get very hot because of their proximity to
the batteries and drive units, so Soviet and Nato designers have evolved special
heat pipe techniques to vent the heat quickly to the surrounding medium
(seawater). The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 freed up a pool of talent,
some of which formed the nucleus of the HotServer Tech design team.
Instead
of needing expensive air conditioning, which would be uneconomic and wasteful of
energy, the heat pipes from the new servers are plumbed directly into heat
exchangers in the customers' own coffee machines. The patented variable speed
clocking technology uses real time information from the Java enabled coffee
machines, and time of day data to reduce the speed of the processors back down
to commercial (cool) speeds at times of day when there is less demand on the
system, outside normal business hours. This greatly extends the MTBF of the
systems compared to earlier generations of dumb heat sink technologies. | | |
