Status of Fly

Yeah. That’s up 96 CPU’s and 64GB of RAM from before lunch. Not bad.

I love those nodes. They are just so enormously badass. They’re like a cluster in a box. So in case it wasn’t obvious, we now have compute-4-3 and compute-4-4. They’re also just so easy to install. I took the rails out of the box, clipped them into the rack, took the nodes out of the boxes, dropped them into the rails, slid them into the rack. Plugged in two power cords each to two different UPSes each, plugged in and routed the network cables, ziptied up the power cords to make them look pretty, fired up insert-ethers –rack 4 –rank 3, turned on node 3, plugged in a keyboard and mouse, hit F12, waited for it to come up in insert ethers and start the install, repeat for the other one. I think it took me less than half an hour from start to finish.

In anticipation of two new 48-core nodes (!!), Kyle Harrington and I (thanks Kyle!) replaced the old threaded-hole rack that compute-2-x, compute-3-3, compute-4-x, the head node, and the UPSes for the cluster sat in. I have not yet put compute-3-3 back up. The new Dells are coming with rails that only work in round or square hole racks, so in order to rack these and any other modern machines, this move was necessary. In the process, we had to shut down the entire cluster, and compute-1-10 did not come back up. Looks like a power supply. Compute-1-6 is down because I have replaced its internals with a hexa-core Phenom and 16GB of RAM, but the onboard ethernet is not supported by ROCKS. I’m going to get a motherboard of which this is not true, but we are out of money, so it has to wait until July 1…

I just got an email that the two new 48-core nodes are in, so perhaps this afternoon, the capacity of the cluster will nearly double…