On February 12, 2016 11:50:52 PM PST, jdd <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:

...

All,

I think the answer is no, but since I haven't messed with one before, I thought I would ask. I ended up with an older supermicro server with 4 opteron 8360 processors. (all 90 lbs. of it) My intent was to install opensuse as a base and then vm-player or similar virtualization software to test how the various virtual hosts would behave on that platform.

Are there any special considerations for the base install with multiple processors? -- or -- is it just an install as usual and let

Le 13/02/2016 07:56, David C. Rankin a écrit : the

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kernel and hardware sort out which processor does what?

I suspect opensuse won't care, but thought I would ask before I end up shooting myself in the foot.

What say the experts?

I'm not really an expert, but I use a multiprocessor server for years without problem with 13.1 and have no processor problem with Leap and virtualbox

but I can't make xen work on Leap, dunno why

jdd

Is this perhaps related to the way SLED is licensed? Maybe that has crept into opensuse? -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/13/2016 02:48 AM, Per Jessen wrote:

Apart from weight, cooling and noise are the main issues with large servers. Two fans is a little low, a typical HP Proliant will have maybe 12 (in total). :-)

So far I can count 16 80mm fans, and that doesn't include the hot-swap bays and triple-redundant hot-swap 1000W power supplies. And yes -- weight. When they guy I got it from said he had a server for me, I was thinking blade or something not much bigger than a laptop. This thing is 1/2 a coffin -- weighs as much too. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Saturday, 2016-02-13 at 04:38 -0600, David C. Rankin wrote:

So far I can count 16 80mm fans, and that doesn't include the hot-swap bays and triple-redundant hot-swap 1000W power supplies. And yes -- weight. When they guy I got it from said he had a server for me, I was thinking blade or something not much bigger than a laptop. This thing is 1/2 a coffin -- weighs as much too.

And it must draw a lot of electricity... why use it at all? :-? :-) - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAla/PmwACgkQtTMYHG2NR9UFyQCgl7jOnDuskhAuZe0q1cD+jtuX x6IAn1azcWOHK+yxNQYYb1kNMi1y6hg1 =DQz0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 2016-02-13 19:04, John Andersen wrote:

This is an OpenPGP/MIME encrypted message (RFC 4880 and 3156) --lmd1lbqTpO6OFxhpMV8ftENPi40oXfF9p Content-Type: application/pgp-encrypted Content-Description: PGP/MIME version identification

The message is encrypted, nobody can read it, except perhaps you. :-?? -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)

On 02/13/2016 08:32 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:

And it must draw a lot of electricity... why use it at all? :-? :-)

Depending on the amount of power required and the fan noise, in the long run, I may not. But no true geek would pass up the opportunity to play with an hand-me-down industrial size server from an ISP. It's just too good an opportunity to spend $100 on parts (another 40G of RAM off eBay ($40) and 2 more opteron processors ($39) and a replacement heat sink & fan ($16)) -- and play :) Who knows, if the FX-8350 w/16G will build KDE3 in a little over 3 hours, maybe this guy can cut it down to 2? Plus, I couldn't think of a better platform to see how many different ways I could play with virtualization. I've not done a bare-metal type virtualization before. I'll try the normal route with a normal base OS first, but then I want to look at the bare-metal vmware offering and a couple of others. Lot's of reading to do.... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/13/2016 04:05 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:

On 02/13/2016 08:32 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:

...

And it must draw a lot of electricity... why use it at all? :-? :-)

Depending on the amount of power required and the fan noise, in the long run, I may not. But no true geek would pass up the opportunity to play with an hand-me-down industrial size server from an ISP. It's just too good an opportunity to spend $100 on parts (another 40G of RAM off eBay ($40) and 2 more opteron processors ($39) and a replacement heat sink & fan ($16)) -- and play :)

Plus another $20-30 a month in electricity. :-)) -- Ken linux since 1994 S.u.S.E./openSUSE since 1996 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/13/2016 01:07 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

David,

I server like that is dangerous. It can create a time warp and suck you in, never to see family or friends again.

Chuckling ... my wife would agree...

If you ever need to escape the dangers of that server, I'm sure there are several of us that would be willing to face that danger head on!

It pure play-time. Sure it's old, but it is a new experience.

== More seriously, how much RAM does that beast have? How many cores? (The number of CPU chips is really not that relevant. It is the total number of cores that matters as I understand it.)

This thing is a Supermicro H8QM8-2 board: http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/MCP55/MNL-H8QM8E-2_1.0d.pdf It has 4 quad-core opteron 8360 SE processors (P/N: OS8360YAL4BGH). It has 32 G of PC2-5300p (16 x 2G). I haven't found the part number for the case yet, but it is a supermiro case that is 17.5 x 7 inches across the front and 30 inches deep. The front is layed out in 3 sections. The left 1/3 is 3 tri-redundant hot swappable 1000W power supplies. The center is 5 hot-swappable 5.25 in SATA drive bays, there are all kinds of on-board I/O connectors from floppy to 40-pin SCSI. The board itself takes of over 1/2 the 17 x 30 case. It will take me a while to digest all the various different ways this can be configured. It comes with 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, on-board ATI graphics, and probably a lot more I haven't stumbled over yet.

Here's a single chip CPU with 20 cores: http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwell-ep-xeon-e5-2698-v4-processor/

20 cores? That's nuts.

The last 2 CPUs I bought had 6-cores.

To run several VMs simultaneously you will want both a lot of ram and

Yes, what little reading I've done says RAM is king. However, I also read that some of the virtualization packages allow RAM and other peripheral use beyond each virtual-host boundary that can help further maximize resources. From what I understand, it will basically create a resource pool among the virtual hosts and even if one host is set to use 1G of RAM, if it demands more than 1G and there is available RAM in the pool, it will have access to the available pool RAM on a temporary basis. (it sounds like a basic scheme to get 40 virtual hosts out of hardware where only 32 would be numerically possible - smart guys) Should equate to plenty of playtime :)

a bunch of cores.

-- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 5:10 PM, Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:

On 2016-02-13 22:59, David C. Rankin wrote:

...

On 02/13/2016 01:07 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

...

Here's a single chip CPU with 20 cores: http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwell-ep-xeon-e5-2698-v4-processor/

20 cores? That's nuts.

...

The last 2 CPUs I bought had 6-cores.

To run several VMs simultaneously you will want both a lot of ram and

Yes, what little reading I've done says RAM is king.

But another issue is that the original design has a singly data bus. To speed things up you need that the cpu chips can access their own memory pool simultaneously.

I suspect that a chip with so many cores doesn't have those many address and data buses, one per core.

Actually, I don't know how this is handled.

That's one reason multi-tier cache is so valuable. Each core has it's own dedicated cache as I understand it so there are a lot of memory accesses that never go out to the DIMMs. As to ram itself, DDR4 (or at least some implementations of DDR4) have quad memory channels so 4 different cores can be pulling data simultaneously. I don't know when this becomes really useful, but I suspect the 6-core PC I recently built isn't really taking advantage of all 4 quad channels. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:

But we are talking now of big machines with dozens of cores or chips. With only a few channels, there will be collisions.

When I was studying, the books said that they did not know yet how to handle this situation.

NUMA - Non-Uniform Memory Access This 4-year old paper from Intel says their high-end Xeon's were already using NUMA back then. At the time the biggest single Intel CPU had 10 cores. There is one about to come out with 22 cores (44 threads with hyper threading) so I'm sure NUMA is even more common in large core count Xeons.. http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/vir... === OVERALL PERFORMANCE CHANGES Over the last three to four years, CPU and server platform performance have increased dramatically. The Intel server platform has gone through a complete evolution, which has brought about significant changes and redesign of CPUs, memory subsystems, I/O subsystem, and graphics. We have increased the CPU core count from two to 10 cores and reintroduced Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT), which doubles the number of software threads per CPU core to a maximum of 20 in today’s highest-performing CPUs. The CPU execution pipeline has changed, instructions issued per clock cycle have increased, and new features such as Turbo Mode have been introduced. The memory controller has been integrated into the CPU and the memory structure has changed, moving from Uniform Memory Access (UMA) architecture to Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture. Therefore, comparing older-generation CPUs and platform architectures is not an easy task. The difficulty increases with virtualization, where oversubscription of resources is now possible, heavily modifying non-virtualized behavior and increasing the difficulty of making a comparison. === Greg -- Greg Freemyer www.IntelligentAvatar.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org