December 16, 2002
(IDG News Service)
RLX Technologies Inc. has released a new blade server that runs on one of Transmeta Corp.'s fastest Crusoe processors to date, the company announced today.
RLX has been a rare animal in the server world, using Crusoe processors typically found in laptops to power large racks of blade servers. The ServerBlade 1000t from RLX uses 1-GHz Crusoe chips and replaces existing systems based on a 667-MHz version of the processor, said Kim Elsey, product manager at RLX.
RLX also sells blade servers based on Intel Corp.'s Pentium III processor. It's positioning the Crusoe-based server as an answer for customers concerned about the power consumption and cooling costs of their server racks. The Crusoe processors consume relatively little power when running at full speed and almost no power when idle, which can benefit users who stack hundreds of thin blade servers in racks, Elsey said.
RLX has priced the 1000t server at $1,329 with one 1-GHz TM5800 Crusoe, 640MB of memory and no hard drive. The servers run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server and Advanced Server and Red Hat Inc.'s Linux distribution.
Wu-chun Feng, team leader of the Research and Development in Advanced Network Technology group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has used the RLX systems to create a large cluster of servers running the Linux operating system. He built a 240-processor cluster called Green Destiny earlier this year (see story) and is now using the faster 1000t systems in a 480-processor cluster called the Green Machine.
Feng said he found that using the slower but low-power Transmeta chips can cut down on the cooling and administrative costs associated with running a large cluster. The processors generate less heat than most other server processors, he said, which helps lessen the amount of failures of other components in a server. In addition, the Green Machine can run in a hot warehouse with no special cooling equipment, whereas other high-performance computers tend to require cooling systems.
"When you buy a vehicle, the decision metric that you use is not necessarily horsepower or top speed," Feng wrote in an e-mail response to questions. "The metric (or set of metrics) that you use could be fuel efficiency, reliability, safety, cost or off-road worthiness. Similarly, when you buy a compute cluster, you should choose a cluster based on your intended application for the cluster."