While I know that most people probably would never have a use for this, but like the quad system - I think that I should share with you stuff that I find interested, banking on that for the majority of you; you'd never come close to systems similar to what I use AT HOME. (And it's not a knock off or anything, Necro and I have talked about this in detail and he says that it's neat for me to tell him stuff cuz the chances of him coming close to systems like the ones I use would be if I invite him over.)

In any case.

*drool*

First off - "Junior"



Yes, that is 14-drive headers onboard PLUS one standard IDE (PATA) header, and floppy. So, in theory, you can support 16 hard drives, and a floppy entirely all on the ONE board; WITHOUT using any add-on card. *sic*

"Big Bertha"




Yes, that's right - quad Socket F. Betcha that would do REAL nicely on Sandra.

Note that BOTH of them have FOUR PCIe x16 slots!

By the way, where it says "(2) HyperTransport v1.0 connectors"; that's to add on another daughter-board that has 4 more sockets, and 16 more DIMM slots for a total of 8 sockets, and 32 DIMM slots.

"Junior" is all yours for the LOW LOW price of $483 (acmemicro.com - Acme Intel Supermicro Chenbro Rackmount Servers & Chassis for XEON Itanium Athlon Opteron scsi sca sata...) which really, isn't bad at all. It makes a kick ass platform!

Sidenote: The original motherboard that I had spec'd out for the file server (see below) was gonna be $440.

I ended up choosing a cheaper one, and as such; I also ended up getting a physical interference between the original heatsink that I got for it was pushing up against the hard drive controller card such that I couldn't run the system safely without changing the heatsink to a rackmount solution.

Most of the time, you don't have that problem because the slots are far down enough. I guess this was the one exception to it.

"Big Bertha" is available for $1265. I would expect the daughter card to be somewhere between $1100-1500 (like it's somewhat older brother for the Socket940 platform).
(acmemicro.com - Acme Intel Supermicro Chenbro Rackmount Servers & Chassis for XEON Itanium Athlon Opteron scsi sca sata...)

The crazy thing: My contract work has more computer horsepower "planted" in my room than I do in the entire office for my regular "day job" (co-op with the ChemBio defense stuff).

HPC for $15G or less per node.

I'm just waiting to rebuild (partially) some of my design systems so that my designing capabilities would better match my abilities to solve the cases. (Because right now, I can get "answers" faster than I can come up with "questions".)

*drool*

You make me sick, you suck on so many levels its not even funny! You are just one big show off.....


OK now that is out of my system (only because I am jealous), with that kind of hardware what are you using for an OS? MS or something proprietary to the systems? Very impresive motherboards and once populated I'm sure would be impressive systems.

Why would the daughter card for "Big Bertha" be so much? Is there some controllers on it as well?

If I hit the lotteryn or find a generous sponsor one day...you bet your ass I would be building a "Heavy Metal" rig for benchmarking based on this type of server hardware!

(And I WOULD find a way to OC it if I had to replace the PLL chip by hand, or pay somone to make me a version of clock gen that would be compatiable!)

PCMARK and Sandra CPU scores would be so far off the chart...it would be like standing on top of the mountin and looking down at the "Ants" at the base to see the second place scores!

Or better yet, you could use it to virtualize every system in you house, and run an entire computer infastructure on one actual physical devices. Oh the possibilities. Just think. A hacking network with sole perpose to help you hone your skillz. and w/e esle you wanted.

Quote: Originally Posted by Lokie You make me sick, you suck on so many levels its not even funny! You are just one big show off..... OK now that is out of my system (only because I am jealous), with that kind of hardware what are you using for an OS? MS or something proprietary to the systems? Very impresive motherboards and once populated I'm sure would be impressive systems. Why would the daughter card for "Big Bertha" be so much? Is there some controllers on it as well?

http://www.atacom.com/program/print_...BAC_TYAN_CP_EX

Well, some of the reasons that I can think of:

The daughter-board has it's own power inputs, and has four 4-phase VRMs and that it has to communicate to the motherboard via the HT links.

Since they can't put 8 sockets and have it still fit in a regular case; so they have to build "upwards"; which means that it's a separate piece that has to be designed, tested, prototyped - and all of that always add cost.

So, it's bound by the same "governance" for any product design and manufacturing.

On top of that, I would think that it's a pretty low volume job (i.e. annual unit production); which also helps to bump the cost up.

In terms of an OS; right now for the quad, I am dual booting Windows Server 2003 x64 Enterprise Edition (that I got during the AMD Tech Tour like two years ago or something) and RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 AS.

And because I don't want to activate my Windows, so I am currently looking into "downgrading" that to either Windows XP Pro SP2 (32-bit), which means that I would lose the ability to use all 16 GB of RAM, and it won't be able to "see" half of the processors; or I go with Windows XP Pro x64, where I should be able to see all 16 GB of RAM, but still lose half of the processors (because XP is limited to 2 single core or dual-core processors).

Server2k3 x64 Enterprise can address up to 8 processors (although it makes no mention of whether they're single core or dual core, so I am presuming it to be 8 processor cores regardless of physical layout).

The biggest reason for me to do the downgrade - soem of the programs that I need/want to use don't work on Server2k3, so; that's another big reason for me to downgrade - especially since the actual bulk of the work is done on the Linux platform anyways. (faster)

(I know, long answer to a short question). But no proprietary OSes required. Actually, I think that Solaris would have worked very nicely on that system except that I don't have any apps that run on the x64 platform (because there are no restrictions on processor and memory unlike the others). *sigh* oh well.

Quote: Originally Posted by $SOLID$ Necro If I hit the lotteryn or find a generous sponsor one day...you bet your ass I would be building a "Heavy Metal" rig for benchmarking based on this type of server hardware! (And I WOULD find a way to OC it if I had to replace the PLL chip by hand, or pay somone to make me a version of clock gen that would be compatiable!) PCMARK and Sandra CPU scores would be so far off the chart...it would be like standing on top of the mountin and looking down at the "Ants" at the base to see the second place scores!

Well, it would DEFINITELY be very interesting if I got a PCIe video card to see how this thing would perform on some of the newer Futuremark benches.

Truth in practice though; it is highly unlikely that a system like that would ever be used for practical reasons. BUT; if it did, it'd be one freaking crazy kick ass workstation.

Quote: Originally Posted by The Captain Or better yet, you could use it to virtualize every system in you house, and run an entire computer infastructure on one actual physical devices. Oh the possibilities. Just think. A hacking network with sole perpose to help you hone your skillz. and w/e esle you wanted.

you don't need that much to practice hacking. I mean, unless you're that good already that you need something like that to practice.....

A highly secured UNIX will be more than sufficient.