An Analysis
What happens when you put four mini-itx motherboards, four disks, a power supply and a management microcontroller into a single 2U rackmount case?
Density somewhere between regular rackmount cases and blades. Costs per node below beige box prices.
Mini-ITX? In a cluster?
Nobody has a gun to your head. We won't feel bad if you laugh at us. On the other hand they just might work well.
How did you come up with this idea?
Instant Messenger and the FriendDA . After hearing about the coming computing nuclear furnace on the head of a pin type problems that will be the next decade we though there must be a better way. Sure enough, there was. Low power chips in large quantity combined with plenty of bus bandwidth (disk, frontside, memory, etc) and you've got a workhorse for the really big problems.
