Open standard blade server systems enable high performance applications

This paper describes a new category of bladed computing systems with low cost-of-entry and extremely high processing density for network-intensive applications. Due to compliance with well-known industry specifications, the system retains standards-based vendor-neutral configurability. To analyze this system configuration, we propose a straightforward method for normalizing blade systems and describing the overall value of candidate system architectures. Our hope is that this approach to comparison will reveal characteristics of blade systems in terms of the primary driving factors for scientific applications: efficiency of system design-time, cost-effective density of components, and breadth of multi-vendor options.