Re: 20090305: motherlode specs

Hi Tom,

The specs for Motherlode are below.  South Dakota State's machine has 
slightly slower CPUs, half the memory and pretty much no storage.  The 
lack of disk puzzles me as a mirrored 73GB would be good for an OS, a 
modest LDM queue and a small amount of data.  For example, newshemp has 
800GB of disk for storage.  As an ingester, this system would either 
need to pass data quickly to another host or some NAS at which point I 
the 8 cores is significant overkill since it does not use cycles to 
serve data.

Perhaps Gempak has some "small data file/high processing" needs of which 
I am not aware.  Your own experience with Gempak demands and data sizes 
is needed.

Brian


Here's a rundown of the equipment in Motherlode:

Motherboard: One (1) Supermicro X7DWN+ motherboard
CPU: Two (2) Intel quad core Xeon 2.66 GHz E5430 CPUs w/active cooler
Memory: Sixteen (16) Crucial 4GB DDR2 5300 FB-DIMM
Disk: Two (2) 250GB 7200RPM SATA 3.5" drives
Backup Disk: One (1) 250GB 7200RPM SATA 2.5" drive
RAID Controllers: Two (2) Adaptec RAID 31205 cards
RAID Disk: Twenty-four (24) Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM 32MB SATAII 3.5" drives
Remote Management: One (1) Supermicro AOC-SIMSO+ IPMI system management card
Remote Management Extension Cable: One (1) Supermicro CBL-0177L IPMI 
data cable
Extra Cooling: Four (4) High RPM 92mm fans
Case: One (1) Guanghsing GHI-583 with 8087 multi-lane, 6 8087-8087 
cables, Socket 771 CPU kit, 1600W PS, 24+8+4+4 power connectors, 
DVD/CDRW, 3.5" drive brackets and rails

Total cost ~$14K although the unit is held together with epoxy and cable 
ties.  I would not recommend this solution for someone not ready to 
jury-rig.


Tom Yoksas wrote:
> Hi Mike and Brian,
>
> Do we have a spec list for the current motherlode?
>
> This would be useful for me as I try to respond to sites asking
> about new equipment purchases.
>
> Speaking of sites asking about new equipment purchases, the climat
> specialist at South Dakota State is asking us to comment on the
> following machine they are thinking about purchasing:
>
>   * Processor: Two Quad Core Xeon L5420 (2x6MB Cache, 2.5GHz) 1333MHz FSB
>   * Memory: 32 GB (8x4GB quad ranked DIMMs)
>   * Disk: Two 73GB 15k rpm SAS 2.5" (HotPlug) on raid 1
>   * Raid: Integrated SAS/SATA RAID 1, PERC 6/i Integrated/SAS6/iR
>   * Controller: PERC6i SAS (256MB cache)
>   * OS: No floppy drive or OS (we will go with CentOS 5.x)
>   * Network: Two embedded Broadcom gigabit
>   * Optical: SATA CDRW/DVD-ROM
>   * Power: Redundant, dual power cords
>   * Support: 5 year, NBD onsite
>   
>   [Attached: specs in HTML format]
>   
>   It would cost us around 6 to 7K. We were thinking of bumping up the
>   hard disk size and go with two 320 or 500 GB 10k SATA 3.5" drives
>   instead of SAS. We don't intend to archive data on this server; just
>   channel the IDD stream, and therefore I chose 73GB SAS. In the next 5
>   years, though, if need to archive data for any reason a bigger disk
>   would help.
>   
>   I will greatly appreciate your thoughts on this server. In comparison
>   to this our current ingester has humble configuration.
>
> Without knowing what is in the current motherlode, the listing above
> struck me as being the same class of machine.  Am I correct in this
> view?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom
> --
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