Re: Hefty Big Iron Sun Machines.

> On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 18:21 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
>
>> E6500 w/8 400MHz/8MB cache CPU's
>> E5500 w/6 400MHz/8MB cache CPU's
>> E6000 w/6 336MHz/4MB cache CPU's
[snip]
> That's a heck of a nice donation. :)

You ain't a kiddin' (said with a distinct Donnie Barnes accent.... :-)

We found a company that had a lot of good equipment for a great price
(they even said they'd give us double our money back if we weren't
satisfied! :-)) for the taking, locally.  Maybe I should say they found
us; our communications director (PR person) was at the NC State House a
couple of months ago, the chair of NCTA was there, a group from NCTA came
up to PARI, became enthralled with what we do, and one of the members
mentioned an opportunity for equipment donations.  A 501(c)(3)
acknowledgement later... :-)  No, they don't have any more big iron Suns. 
They do have a largish (64 CPU, looked like) HP PA-RISC box, but I REALLY
don't want that space heater.  It had a 100A 240V plug on it; while I do
have that kind of power available, I can't justify that big of a power
bill.

> I wouldn't go more than 24. Right now, we're building the SMP kernels to
> max out at 24, because of strange compile errors (which may be gone,
> don't know).

After thinking about it, and researching the CPU's I have, it looks like
14 400/8MB CPU's will go in the 6500, 8 400/4MB modules in the 5500 (the
400/4MB modules only run 4x multiplier, and require a 100MHz Gigaplane,
and the 6500 runs the Gigaplane at 90MHz max), and I'll load the 6000 down
with 336's (which I think I have enough of).  I don't have any FC-AL
drives (and it seems the FC-AL support in 2.6 is lacking anyway) so the
3500's aren't terribly useful, so I'll strip out their modules to put the
400/4MB CPU's in, dropping them in the 5500.  Anyway, that's probably not
too interesting to the list.

I'm not sure how many or which box(es) will be powered up; I do know I
need a more capable mail server (I just have to justify the power bill;
e-mail, anitvirus, and antispam is justification aplenty).

> It depends on how the buildsystems are setup. Dan Williams has been
> pooling the Aurora resources within Red Hat using plague and mock to set
> up an Aurora buildsystem. If we can take your resources and add them to
> that, then it should be possible to build Aurora packages too,
> regardless of the host OS.

What do I need to provide to get the required access to the box for plague
(I haven't investigated it yet, but it sounds interesting)?  We can
arrange RSA SSH.

> CentOS 4 on SPARC is going to be a more difficult issue. That will
> almost certainly hit the exact same issues as the Aurora 2.0 tree, even
> more if you try to use the RHEL 4 kernel SRPM as a base.

Indeed.  Have you heard of the effort before?  If not, the developer is a
guy named Pasi; see the CentOS list archives for details.  Not sure how
far along he is; nothing public yet.

> I'd prefer that people interested in SPARC focused on helping us get the
> Aurora 2.0 release out. The next logical step is to get SPARC as a
> supported arch for Fedora, and once that's done, it will make the task
> of future CentOS builds on SPARC much simpler.

Well, honestly, I'm sure you understand the attraction of running an
Enterprise OS on Enterprise hardware.  Aurora is nice, but if it follows
Fedora much the upgrade roller coaster is going to be killer.  That's why
I transitioned to CentOS 4 for all my linux desktops and servers, except
for the Aurora ones.  As PARI isn't a degree-granting institution, the
academic RHEL isn't an option (at least according to the website). 
Anyway, if I ran RHEL4 like I run CentOS 4, I'd void my support anyway,
since I use the kde-redhat and DAG repositories in addition to the CentOS
base (KDE 3.4's kstars does telescope control....).
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
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