On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 02:51:58PM -0500, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
John R Pierce wrote:
On 03/08/12 6:33 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
ok, so 3 x 48/64 core servers uses the same power as 6 x 4/8 core ? thats still major win.
Um, no - that's what I'm saying is*not* the case. The new suckers drink power - using a UPS that I could hang, say, 6 Dell 1950's off of,*if* I'm lucky, I can put three of the new servers. And at that, if a big jobs running (they very much vary in how much power they draw, depending on usage), even with only three on, I've seen the leds run up to where they're blinking, indicating it's near overload, over 90% capability.
ok, how do you figure 3 48 core modern servers are not more powerful computationally than 6 8 core servers? the 1950's were "cloverton" which were dual core2duo chips, 2 sockets, at ~ 2-3GHz, for your 8 cores per 1U.
I'm sorry, but to me, the above is a non sequitur. I was talking about how much power the servers drink, and that the UPSs that I have can barely, barely handle half as many or less, and I'm running out of UPSs, and out of power outlets for them in such a small space (that is, a dozen or so in each rack), without trying to go halfway across the room.
If you need lots of smaller servers, supermicro makes a very nice single socket amd G34 board: http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron6000/SR56x0/H8SGL-F.cfm
I have a bunch of those in production, and they work well. Most of mine only have 32GiB ram; I bought them back when 8GiB modules were expensive; but if I bought one today, they'd have 64GiB, as 8GiB reg. ecc ddr3 is cheap now. They use more than half what a dual G34 board with double the ram/cpu would use, but not a lot more than half.
One of those single-socket G34 boards should use rather less power than a dual-socket 1950 with FBDIMMs and it should give you rather more compute power and ram. (ugh. as someone that uses a lot of ram and pays a lot for power, I hate FBDIMMs. I was almost entirely AMD socket F during that time period for the reg.ecc ddr2. all my new stuff is intel 56xx with reg. ecc ddr3.)
Also, they make lower power G34 CPUs... they cost a bit more, but when you are paying California prices for power, it's usually worth it, especially if you plan on keeping the thing for 5 years rather than just 3.