Status of Fly

I bought us a SuperMicro 2042G-TRF and installed four 16-core processors and 16 x 4GB quad-ranked RAM from IT (they couldn’t use it due to some motherboard limitation we don’t have), so we now have a 64-core, 64GB node! It’s currently called compute-4-6 for some silly reason (fly picked up two MACs from the node, and the second appears to be the primary interface. Oh well. Maybe I’ll fix it at some point). I haven’t installed it in the rack yet, but I’m psyched to try it out! Oh and also, this whole thing only cost us $3600, so I had some money left over to get a couple clones of compute-1-7!

It looks like Kwaku accidentally discovered a problem with the new node’s config. It crashed in the middle of him running something on it, and I found it totally unresponsive due to (probably) overheating. I think that 2U just isn’t enough room for this heatsink and fan combo to work with, and also I think that the placement of the memory prevents airflow through the heatsink fins. Clearly the fins should be facing the other direction. I think it will be clear from this pic. Unless I can figure out some way around this, that nixes using these. Perhaps a different heatsink, or maybe even just getting two 8GB memory modules and putting them in the slots further away from the processor?

I replaced compute-1-4’s power supply. I also replaced compute-1-7’s innards. It was a 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. It is now a 3.1Ghz octa-core Phenom with 16GB of RAM. Cost for this upgrade: ~$400. I’ll be “benchmarking” it shortly (with dnetc, not a real benchmark, but might have something to do with something).