Massive upgrade complete
Friday, July 2nd, 2010…except for the front page of fly and the wiki, which I still have to update and/or migrate over. Plus, of course, any software config that I forgot. Synopsis:
Before: 40 nodes, 160GB of RAM, 84 processor cores. (in March)
After: 32 nodes, 240GB of RAM, 162 processor cores.
Now I just have to compute our power savings, which I’m sure is quite substantial, since it’s not just power drawn, but that is actually more than doubled, because you have to factor in A/C as well. Those old dual-Xeon P4 HT nodes I pulled out (11 of them!) used a lot of power.
The two nodes in rack 4 are both going full-bore right now with Lee’s Clojure GC runs, and they’re throwing off a surprisingly small amount of heat – less than the old compute-0-x nodes used to at idle, by the “hand at the back of the rack” test, which is, as we all know, extremely accurate.
We had a little adventure with compute-1-9, which wouldn’t stay up, and I bought it a new motherboard and CPU before finally figuring out (with Doug’s help) that it was actually the power supply the entire time. Of course, I replaced the old dual-core 2.13Ghz CPU with a quad-core 2.6Ghz, and the motherboard is much better, and it’s got 8GB of RAM now, so we made out well in the end. Putting a generic off-the-shelf power supply in that node was a big of a kludge – had to turn the fan around backwards so that air would flow the correct direction, and then use a power extension cable to get the power to the back of the case. It looks a little silly, but works fine.
We’ll see over the next few weeks how many things I forgot.
I also only restored accounts that had been actually used this semester, so I may get some account restoration requests – no problem.
Reminder to self: put new backup drive in place and set backups back up.
