Baserock ARM servers (nobody.delete@this.example.com) on August 21, 2012 4:13 pm wrote:
> I imagine these guys will be really happy to start shipping nodes with more than
> 2GB RAM. Pretty interesting setup - low-power, 64 cores per rack-unit, 10GbE
> for intra-rack networking.

They might be able to take advantage of the Cortex A-15's (or A7's) virtualization and Large Physical Address Extension features to support significantly more than 4GiB of memory, though it is not clear that such a temporary transition would be worth the bother. Codethink's targeted uses ("Cloud computing infrastructure" and "Native ARM build and test") seem to fit virtualization fairly well, assuming the virtualization overhead is sufficiently small.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that a good and cheap/free virtualization solution for Linux on ARM will be available soon. (I doubt there will be a Linux fork or patch set supporting LPAE. Having a Linux--rather than hypervisor--base might make page-level copy avoidance easier, though using a hypervisor would have some advantages.)

The Baserock Slab seems to occupy an interesting point. Each half-depth (which seems a bit odd in my ignorance) server can support eight compute System-on-Module units ("blades") which each have a dedicated SSD and an extra SATA port and a management SoM. The networking appears to be shared across the server (unlike the storage); a single power supply is shared across the server.