Blade technology lies at the heart of Los Alamos’s year-old Green Destiny cluster, which is designed to combine supercomputer power with size and energy efficiency. Using 240 blades supplied by RLX, the system is capable of 160 gigaflops (billions of computations per second). That’s not particularly fast for a supercomputer; the Q supercomputer, Green Destiny’s conventional server-based counterpart, is almost 200 times as fast. Green Destiny, however, costs 640 times less than Q?$335,000 compared with $215 million. Q also requires a costly temperature-controlled, dust-free environment.

Los Alamos’s old 128-processor standalone cluster consumed 48 square feet of space. Green Destiny, on the other hand, requires only 6 square feet. Feng says Green Destiny also provides "significantly better reliability" while cutting costs. "Our belief is that we will save roughly two to three times in terms of total cost of ownership," he says. His team is so impressed with blades that it will use the technology in its next supercomputer?a 480-processor monster cluster, dubbed The Green Machine. Looking to the future, Feng says, "I would view our Green Destiny cluster as the Toyota Camry of blade-server clusters."

All Blades Aren’t Alike

While many enterprises shun emerging technologies, Los Alamos had no choice but to be a trailblazer, says Feng. "With the type of research that we do, we have always been inventors, pre-adopters or early adopters of technology." Feng admits, however, that blades can be a tough buy for CIOs who have just begun studying the market. "Although blade servers are a new technology, there are already many different flavors of blades," he says. "Make sure you buy the blade that’s appropriate for your application and your environment."

Yet finding the right type of blade is hardly a simple matter, since vendors are approaching the technology from various directions. The three major market players?Dell, HP and IBM?are focusing their efforts on general business customers by providing blades based on mainstream Intel processors, ranging from the antiquated Pentium III (on Dell and HP systems) to the high-octane, dual-processor Xeon (on IBM blades). Sun, meanwhile, is following a tactical approach that targets specific customer needs such as network edge applications, telecommunications and enterprise applications. RLX, for its part, is paying special attention to technical customers.

It’s still too early to tell which blade strategy, if any, will ultimately dominate the market. Unfortunately, the proprietary nature of current blade products means that managers will likely have a difficult time shifting to another vendor’s technology should their current vendor’s blade fall out of favor. "Everybody calls their product a blade, although there’s a lot of differentiation in terms of what processors they use, how physically big they are...and what capabilities [they have]," says Gartner’s Enck.