PreCentral: HP/Gram donates five super hefty servers to WebOS Ports

[News Reporter]

There's putting your money where your mouth is, and then there's putting your money where your mouth and everybody elses' mouths are. HP/

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has gone for the latter, donating five incredibly hefty servers to the open source . Having spent the time building Open webOS for the Galaxy Nexus , I have an inkling of the kind of power needed to make things happen in a timely fashion - using a virtual machine with two 2.6GHz cores and 4GB of RAM committed to the processes it took at least three hours for my computer to piece things together, and that was just once. Imagine doing that over and over again to test changes made and you have an idea of how much time is spent just staring at a Terminal window that says "preparing runqueue".

HP's looking to make things easier for WebOS Ports. Two years ago , bringing a big chunk of processing and serving power to the homebrew organization. Now they're doing the same for WebOS Ports, except this time they've seriously upped the ante, giving them five . These servers start at $1827.00 each, but as they're each configured with 12-cores worth of processors, a mind-boggling 256GB of RAM, and 4TB of storage, HP's pushed the value of the entire kit-and-kaboodle to over $40,000. The next has some pressure to live up to, eh?

Of course, HP's $40,000 gift to WebOS Ports is without strings, and while it's an awesome demonstration of support for the homebrew community and webOS, it's also a means for HP/Gram to help further webOS. By putting more power in the hands of WebOS Ports, the porting process can be accelerated and expanded, Open webOS can get onto more hardware, and more people can be made aware of webOS, and thus increase exposure and the likelihood that somebody makes new hardware meant to run Open webOS. Plus it's just plain good PR to give away servers - 60 processing cores, 1.5TB of RAM (buh...), and 20TB of storage can do a lot of good for the WebOS Ports effort.