Does Azul have the next Rails box?

I’ve been watching Azul Systems for a little while. They represent a possible computing future that seems like a very natural evolution of our current push into CMT. I.e. VM-specific hardware. The Java VM, in this case. They’ve got a new box:

Azul 3200

The new Vega2 processor they’ve developed has 48 cores capable of executing Java instructions. Depending on the model, you get 2 or 4 of those CPUs, and gobsmacks of RAM (up to 192G - 1GB per core!). From a pure geek factor, it’s pretty frickin’ cool. I won’t comment on what their price/performance looks like compared to throwing a bunch of Opteron or UltraSparc T1 chips at your Java workload (because I simply don’t know), but it’s a pretty interesting product irregardless of what their current pricing is like. I wonder if anyone is building stuff like this for .Net? My guess is no. If JRuby and the Java VM itself continue to get faster, hardware like this might very well be running your Rails app a few years from now. That would be something.

My guess, however, is that we’re too in love with the freedom that our general purpose hardware and general purpose CPUs provide to really start moving to product like Azul’s en masse any time soon. But who knows… The idea of network attached processing sounds pretty compelling to me.

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Published:
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 2:15 am
Author:
mark
Category:
hardware, java, rails