Somehow, I think you misunderstood what this article is about.
Given the very frequent mention of 'disk based storage', and how flash is so much better, I'm not sure that I did.
No it's not about SSD, that is the problem, it reads like they have never heard of them.
Memcached prevents Facebook's disk-based databases from being overwhelmed by a fire hose of millions of simultaneous requests for small chunks of information.
flash memory has much faster random access than disk-based storage
Each FAWN node performs 364 queries per second per watt, which is a hundred times better than can be accomplished by a traditional disk-based system
Swanson's goal is to exploit the unique qualities of flash memory to handle problems that are currently impossible to address with anything other than the most powerful and expensive supercomputers on earth
Swanson's own high-performance, flash-memory-based server, called Gordon, which currently exists only as a simulation...
I'm not saying that a wide array of low-power nodes is a bad idea. But unless they address the current state of technology, rather than a conveniently quaint world in which using flash as your primary storage makes you some sort of innovator, it's hard to take them seriously.
"you could very easily run a small website on one of these servers, and it would draw 10 watts," says Andersen--a tenth of what a typical Web server draws.
And how does that per-website energy usage compare to a normal server, using SSDs, and running enough virtualized instances (or just virtual domains) to match the per-website performance offered by a single FAWN node?
You need to address the actual state of things, and not the strawman of what computing was 6 years ago (or however long) when the project was started. While they've been working, the world hasn't been standing still, and you cannot pretend that spinning disks are the only thing going.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh and it's a failing of TFA and not the original researchers. Given that a dual core Atom330 takes like 8 watts, it is entirely reasonable that you could build a very efficient cluster out of a whole mess of them and a few SSDs, and produce something like you insist that the article was about. That would be interesting, provided that it compared favourably against similarly state of the art systems of course.