How Intel Manages 100,000 Servers

datacenterknowledge.com

10 points1SockChuck6 comments

30,000 servers sounds like an awful lot for "office, IT and web operations". Estimating about 90,000 employees (and it's probably lower[1]) that's 3:1 users per server.

[1] http://www.intc.com/intelAR2008/business/employees/index.htm...

Most of these are SMP machines (and probably multicore chips) so you probably have >1 core per employee... Most of these are probably running engineering tools: simulations, verification, silicon back-end tools.

Current chips require tons of compute power to develop, so this is not surprising [I do wonder how many of these are based on Itanium processors?]

70% of machines are for R&D support - the simulations, verification, silicon back-end etc. you speak of.

I was talking about the other 30%.

Perhaps a new commercial: "Our Server Requirements Aren't Like Your Server Requirements"

Why would you need so much hardware to do what Intel does? What kind of software would they be running on these clusters?

Simulators and EDA tools are very CPU-intensive.

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