Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 at 2:28pm, David Thompson wrote
I have several Opteron/8GB RAM systems, all running centos-4/x86_64. The older ones are on Arima HDAMA motherboards, and the newer ones are on Supermicro H8DAR-T boards. They're very nice systems.
Yeah, what's up with SuperMicro and Opteron systems? Looking at their web site, it's like they have disavowed any knowledge of having built anything Opteron. Did they back out of Opteron, or do you have to be a member of a secret society to get to their information?
One caveat with these Supermicro boards is the the onboard SATA (some sort of Adapted branded Marvell thingy) isn't supported. They offer some sort of binary download, but we all know how much fun that is. I just put 2 port 3wares in 'em all (they're cluster compute nodes). Sure, it's expensive for a simple SATA controller. But it's also no fuss and rock solid. The newer SM boards have HT2000/HT1000 based SATA which centos 4.3 should support, but I've no experience with 'em.
Yeah, I've been there also. We also use alot of threeware in these applications. The other add-in sata that I've used in 3112, but that hasn't always worked.
I don't know how deep my knowledge is, but we run a lot of memory intensive code on these nodes and get a 2X speedup with dual CPUs. So, IME, there's not much penalty with the extra hops to get to the other CPU's memory.
Yeah, it's cheaper to buy two CPUs and use 1GB dimms (8 slots) compared to 1 CPU and 2GB dimms (4 slots). But the CPUs aren't going to be loaded (at all), so I'm concerned of hurting throughput by splitting the memory space. Tyan is working on a mobo with 8 slots per CPU (S3892), but my favorite vendors aren't carrying it (yet).
Dave
On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 03:10:58PM -0500, David Thompson enlightened us:
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 at 2:28pm, David Thompson wrote
I have several Opteron/8GB RAM systems, all running centos-4/x86_64. The older ones are on Arima HDAMA motherboards, and the newer ones are on Supermicro H8DAR-T boards. They're very nice systems.
Yeah, what's up with SuperMicro and Opteron systems? Looking at their web site, it's like they have disavowed any knowledge of having built anything Opteron. Did they back out of Opteron, or do you have to be a member of a secret society to get to their information?
Sorta. http://www.supermicro.com/aplus/
It's not linked anywhere that I can find on their main site.
Matt
On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 at 3:10pm, David Thompson wrote
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Yeah, what's up with SuperMicro and Opteron systems? Looking at their web site, it's like they have disavowed any knowledge of having built anything Opteron. Did they back out of Opteron, or do you have to be a member of a secret society to get to their information?
No, you just need to know the code word -- Aplus. As in http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/.
One caveat with these Supermicro boards is the the onboard SATA (some sort of Adapted branded Marvell thingy) isn't supported. They offer some sort of binary download, but we all know how much fun that is. I just put 2 port 3wares in 'em all (they're cluster compute nodes). Sure, it's expensive for a simple SATA controller. But it's also no fuss and rock solid. The newer SM boards have HT2000/HT1000 based SATA which centos 4.3 should support, but I've no experience with 'em.
Yeah, I've been there also. We also use alot of threeware in these applications. The other add-in sata that I've used in 3112, but that hasn't always worked.
Exactly. If it doesn't always work, then it's not worth spending time on.
I don't know how deep my knowledge is, but we run a lot of memory intensive code on these nodes and get a 2X speedup with dual CPUs. So, IME, there's not much penalty with the extra hops to get to the other CPU's memory.
Yeah, it's cheaper to buy two CPUs and use 1GB dimms (8 slots) compared to 1 CPU and 2GB dimms (4 slots). But the CPUs aren't going to be loaded (at all), so I'm concerned of hurting throughput by splitting the memory space. Tyan is working on a mobo with 8 slots per CPU (S3892), but my favorite vendors aren't carrying it (yet).
I strongly doubt you'd be hurting throughput with 2 CPUs vs. 1.
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David Thompson -
Joshua Baker-LePain -
Matt Hyclak