[CentOS-devel] SPARC build machines perhaps available soon

On Saturday 27 August 2005 15:35, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Thursday 18 August 2005 21:10, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > PARI has been donated three large Enterprise servers; an E6500, and
> > E6000, and an E5500.  I am in process of arranging shipping and pickup,
> > perhaps as soon as next week.  Once delivered, I will be setting these
> > beasts up and checking them out, building drive bays, etc.

> Update:

> I have on site now the following beasts:
> E6500 w/8 400MHz/8MB cache CPU's

Update:

Spacely is up and running. Spacely is now an E6500 with 14 400MHz/8MB CPU's 
and 16GB of RAM, running Aurora Tangerine 1.92.  Some information:
[root at spacely unixbench-4.1.0]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu             : TI UltraSparc II  (BlackBird)
fpu             : UltraSparc II integrated FPU
promlib         : Version 3 Revision 2
prom            : 3.2.30
type            : sun4u
ncpus probed    : 14
ncpus active    : 14
Cpu0Bogo        : 796.67
Cpu0ClkTck      : 0000000017d78400
Cpu1Bogo        : 794.62
Cpu1ClkTck      : 0000000017d78400
Cpu4Bogo        : 794.62
Cpu4ClkTck      : 0000000017d78400
Cpu5Bogo        : 794.62
Cpu5ClkTck      : 0000000017d78400
Cpu8Bogo        : 794.62
Cpu8ClkTck      : 0000000017d78400
Cpu9Bogo        : 794.62
Cpu9ClkTck      : 0000000017d78400
Cpu12Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu12ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
Cpu13Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu13ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
Cpu16Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu16ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
Cpu17Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu17ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
Cpu20Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu20ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
Cpu21Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu21ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
Cpu24Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu24ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
Cpu25Bogo       : 794.62
Cpu25ClkTck     : 0000000017d78400
MMU Type        : Spitfire
State:
CPU0:           online
CPU1:           online
CPU4:           online
CPU5:           online
CPU8:           online
CPU9:           online
CPU12:          online
CPU13:          online
CPU16:          online
CPU17:          online
CPU20:          online
CPU21:          online
CPU24:          online
CPU25:          online
[root at spacely unixbench-4.1.0]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:     16620760 kB
MemFree:      16358784 kB
Buffers:         10032 kB
Cached:         103848 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         138280 kB
Inactive:        21672 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:     16620760 kB
LowFree:      16358784 kB
SwapTotal:     2097136 kB
SwapFree:      2097136 kB
Dirty:              48 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:          12968 kB
Slab:            74336 kB
Committed_AS:    12760 kB
PageTables:        456 kB
VmallocTotal:  3145728 kB
VmallocUsed:       624 kB
VmallocChunk:  3145104 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB
[root at spacely unixbench-4.1.0]#

If anybody has EX500 CPU's, 400MHz/8MB cache, that they'd like to donate, I 
have a few more of the 501-4882 boards that can take that CPU and have 8 more 
slots to fill (16 CPU's more, 30 total) (one donor has come forward with some 
boards and such, and I am very grateful for that!).  

Otherwise, the other 501-4882 boards will go into the E5500 that I robbed the 
400/8MB CPU cards from, and they will get 400MHz/4MB cache CPU's.  Not sure 
how much RAM I have left to fill the slots, though.  I think I can get 12 
CPU's in the E5500 (if I get another or two 501-4882 boards, I'll max the 
E5500 out with 14 CPUs).  The E6000 will get as many 336MHz modules as I can 
scrounge from the 3500's (which are giving up their CPU/memory cards to the 
E5500) and put on the older CPU/memory cards. The smaller DIMMs will likely 
go in the E6000, and it probably won't be powered up often.  I have a pretty 
good case for leaving the E6500 on (looking at running my e-mail server on 
it) and might have a case for the E5500 (as long as I can keep power 
consumption down).

On benchmarks, I've run a Unixbench 4.1 run on the E6500 (see the Aurora-devel 
list for the details) against another Unixbench run on a Dell PE2650 Dual 
3GHz Xeon server.  The results are telling in the high concurrency vein; the 
16 concurrent shell script run on the E6500 pulls 244 lines per minute (lpm), 
on the 2650 I see 366 lpm.  The other benchmarks on the suite are single CPU, 
but even then the 2650's Xeon is only about 5 times faster than the 
400MHz/8MB cache UltraSPARC. 

Now, as to plans for a buildsystem.  I am willing to provide ssh access to a 
user account, RSA/DSA key only, to one or more CentOS developers (I have 
extended much the same offer to the Aurora folks).  I figure that 16GB of RAM 
might be large enough to do the buildroot in ramdisk; correct me if I'm 
wrong.  Doing the build totally in ramdisk might make builds go more quickly.  
Pasi, let me know.  The Aurora folks would prefer development efforts to 
concentrate on Aurora, with an eye to putting the results into CentOS.  The 
Aurora folks are working towards using plague and mock as their buildsystem; 
google for them to find the info (don't have links handy).
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu