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. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University