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Dave Andersen looked into a desk drawer filled with tiny computers. Each was no bigger than a hardback novel, and their chips ran no faster than 600 MHz. Built by a little-known company called Soekris Engineering, they were meant to be wireless access points or network firewalls, and that’s how Andersen — a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon — used them in a previous research project. But that project was over, and he thought: “They’ve got to be good for something else.” At first, he decided these tiny machines could be super-low-power DNS (domain name system) servers — servers that take site names and translate them to a numeric internet address — and he asked some Ph.D. students to make it happen. “I wondered,” he remembers, “if we could do this on a wimpy platform that consumed only about 5 watts of power rather than 500.” Those students proved they could. But they also told Andersen he was thinking too small. After tinkering with his tiny machines, they realized that if you strung a bunch of them together, you could run a massive application each machine could never execute on its own. The trick was to split the application’s duties into tiny pieces and spread them evenly across the network. “They were right,” Andersen says of his students. “We could use these boxes to run high-performance large-scale key-value stores — the kind of [databases] you would run behind the scenes at Facebook or Twitter. And the rest is publication history.” The year was 2008, and as it turns out, Andersen and his students were at the forefront of a movement that could reinvent the way the world uses its servers, making them significantly more efficient — and cramming them into much smaller spaces. Startups such as SeaMicro and Calxeda are now building servers using hundreds of low-power processor cores originally designed for cell phones and other mobile devices. HP is set to resell Calxeda machines as it explores similar systems with a research effort called Project Moonshot. And the giants of the internet — including Google, Amazon, and Facebook — are seriously considering the possibility of running their operations atop the sort of “wimpy” processors Andersen found in his desk drawer. “Wimpy” is the official term. Now into its fourth year, Andersen’s project is known as the Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes, or FAWN. He regrets the name. “No manufacturer wants to advertise their products as wimpy,” he says. But the name certainly suits his research, and despite the negative connotation, the project has attracted the interest of the largest chip maker on earth. Intel sponsors Andersen’s research, and he works closely with researchers at the Pittsburgh lab Intel runs on the Carnegie Mellon campus. The rub is that the Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes isn’t always fast. In some cases, software must be significantly rewritten to achieve high speeds on a collection of low-power processors, and other applications aren’t suited to the setup at all. Like so many others across the server world, Intel is approaching the wimpy-node idea with skepticism — and not just because it makes an awful lot of money selling the far-from-wimpy processors that power today’s servers. “Intel is trying to walk a difficult line,” Andersen says. “Yes, a lot of their profit is from big brawny processors — and they don’t want to undercut that. But they also don’t want their customers to get inappropriately excited about wimpy processors and then be disappointed.” Dave Andersen says that skepticism is healthy. But only up to a point. His research shows that many applications can be far more efficient on wimpy nodes, including not only ordinary web serving but, yes, large databases. “Intel realizes this too,” he says. “And they don’t want to get blindsided.” http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/wimpy_nodes/?intcid=story_ribbon

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