<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:dsavage@peaknet.net">dsavage@peaknet.net</a> wrote: <blockquote cite="mid34757.206.80.72.54.1110082631.squirrel@www.peaknet.net" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 10:11 +0800, Jyh-Shyong Ho wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Robert L Cochran wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">It's quite true I can't afford one of these babies. But it still leads me to another question. Where could I go to be shown how to build, configure, and test these systems? Or are they pretty much the same as consumer systems -- I've built 3 single processor systems for home use. Would these be the same, except one installs more CPUs, heat sinks, and memory. Or does it take specialized knowledge? Thanks Bob </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">Hi, We built a 4-way Opteron server with TYAN mother board and 32GB RAM last September, we used SuSE 9.1 for AMD64, it costed about 30,000 US$. The procedure is the same as for installing sngle and dual Opteron system, no special knowledge is needed (at least in this case, or perhaps we were just lucky). When all components are properly installed, SuSE installer picked up the right kernel and drivers for this 4-way system, the system has been running continuously since then.. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Dr. Ho has probably trumped all of us here by actually having done this. In theory it shouldn't be all that different from building any other high end system, except it would cost up to ten times as much. I would expect the biggest challenges would be hardware: (1) finding a suitable power supply (supplies?), (2) finding an enclosure that could channel enough air across the board to keep it cool, and (3) finding the 4G memory parts. I'll be waiting a few more months until AMD releases dual-core Opterons before I try upgrading to a more affordable quad system with two sockets. -- Doc Robert G. (Doc) Savage, BSE(EE), CISSP, RHCE | Fairview Heights, IL RHEL4/ES on Tyan S2468UGN w/3G, dual Athlon MP 2800+, 1.1T RAID5 "Perfection is the enemy of good enough." -- Admiral of the Fleet Sergei G. Gorshkov </pre> </blockquote> Hi, Next week, a local SI will provide me a price quote for a 8-way Opteron server based on IWill's motherboard, IWill's 8-way Opteron server consists two connected 4-way Opteron boards in a 5U chassis, there are 32 DIMMs available on the server. If one can find 4GB RAM, the server can accomodate 128GB RAM! If we can get the budget this year, we will see what the performance of this 8-way server would be. As a comparison, we have a HP Superdome with 64 IA64 CPUs and 128GB RAM in a 42U rack, which costs about 1,300,000 US$ two years ago. I estimate that the 5U 8-way Opteron server with 128GB RAM would cost about 70,000US$ today. If your applications requires very large memory, IWill's H8501 would be a very good choice (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.iwill.com.tw/product_2.asp?p_id=90&sp=Y">http://www.iwill.com.tw/product_2.asp?p_id=90&sp=Y</a>). 8-way Opteron server should be able to realize the full performance potential of Opteron's design. Best regards Jyh-Shyong Ho, Ph.D. Research Scientist National Center for High Performance Computing Hsinchu, Taiwan, ROC </body> </html>