Just bought 12 new 8-core 24GB nodes… for $2700
April 19, 2013by Wm. Josiah Erikson (wjens)
I just got three of these.
They’re a bit old, but benchmarks put that processor at about half as fast as an FX-8350… and there are two of them per node, and 24GB of RAM each, and they’re Dell servers, so they won’t break all the time, and the whole thing will only take up 6U, and then I can ditch all of Rack2 to make space for them… win win win and better price/performance than gutting and rebuilding the Rack 1 nodes all the time. Cool! I hope this works out for everyone. I think it will.
April 25th, 2013 at 8:40 am
They got delivered today. Time to ditch rack2! Gonna go throw it in the Gaylord… I can’t imagine anybody would want it (though I could be wrong). There are some like compute-2-1 and 2-2 with three times as much RAM on eBay for $80 each and none of them have sold yet… so yeah… gonna throw ’em out. I’ll be glad to see them go. Honestly, they were a giant PITA.
April 25th, 2013 at 8:41 am
Funny… these new nodes are nearly identical to compute-4-1 except they’re L5520’s instead of E5520’s, so they’ll be slightly slower and a bunch more power-efficient. I think we paid around $2500 for compute-4-1. These were $225 each. Heh. It has been a couple of years, but still…
April 25th, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Two boxes arrived – the other is yet to get here. Unfortunately, one of the units was damaged. Three of the four nodes in it function, but the fourth one couldn’t boot up at first, then when I swapped it with three, they both booted up, but four still couldn’t talk to its hard drive. I’ve contacted the ebay seller, and we’ll see what they do – they said they had over 500 of them, so hopefully they’ll just send me another. Also, they didn’t come with rails, so I’ve mounted them in the old blade chassis’ rails, which is essentially a shelf. Because of this (I’m going to put the last one to arrive on the top), I’ve named the ones we’ve got compute-2-5 through compute-2-12 to make things less confusing for myself in the future. All of those other than compute-2-8 should be ready to go. I’ve upped their UDI to just below compute-4-1, and added the “blender” and “tom” tags to them.