New hotrod computer for physics

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New hotrod computer for physics

Postby Doug Coulter » Sat May 07, 2011 10:48 pm

I'm building a new machine for fusor2 this weekend. It's coming along (lots of custom software to install and configure) nicely.

Basic specs:
I7-950 cpu
12 gigs DDR3
GTS-450 vid card (Fermi processor....about 25 gflops for double precision floats)
80 gb intel SSD
2- 500 gb seagate 7200 rpm drives
Asus P6X58-DE Mobo
Toughpower 600w power supply.

Boy is this thing ever fast, and what I'm used to isn't slow - a core II quad core with merely 4 gigs DDR2 and regular harddrives, and a non-fan NVidea card.
Boot time is a few seconds, most of that is the bios delay to allow you to hit del if you want to fool with the bios. Zowie! Since I had a ton of ram (and half the sockets are still empty!) I didn't even set up a swap partition. I've mounted the regular hard drives over /home and /tmp as that's where linux does most of it's writing, to save wear and tear on the SSD. I'm still leaning some tricks there, and might try to repartition one so as to also cover /var, or figure out some trick with a symbolic link. The idea is to just use the SSD for read-mostly things.

There are now a few neat things in the junkbox now...which might get used too.
As in another Nvidia card, this one a Tesla based GTX-285 -- faster and more cores and ram (for single precision floats). And an older asus with a core II -quad cpu and 8 gigs ram. Some of those parts might go into this machine, or another. The mobo had some flakey SATA ports, one of the reasons I pulled it. Seems that little problem intel had with those goes back farther in time than sandy bridge....

Of course, it's linux, in this case 10.04.2 - LTS, with virtualbox to run other opsys under that as needed or desired.
Gawd, this mobo even has 6 gbs SATA (hardware raid), firewire, tons of USB including USB-3, and a bunch of other features I'll probably not use -- I can't see needing tons of audio channels for example here. Hopefully it will be as rock solid as this machine I'm posting from -- that'd be nice. Should be fast enough to really pack away the data in MySQL for fusor runs.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Doug Coulter
 
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Re: New hotrod computer for physics

Postby Doug Coulter » Sun May 08, 2011 1:03 pm

Well, there are always some issues. They'd plugged the SSD into the "special marvell" 6 gbs sata ports -- and while the bios can find it, it doesn't assign it to a sata drive that an opsys can use, and of course the supplied supplemental windows drivers have no use in linux. Switched it to one of the 3 gbs ports, and that's all fine. Hard to beat a 3 second boot time (after the wait in bios, total still under 10 seconds). I added 'noatime' and 'discard' to fstab for that drive to eliminate updating access timestamps for reads (which creates a write for every read), and enable "TRIM" respectively.

I'm having an issue with the Nvidia gts 450, and on searching the web, I'm way not alone. Haven't tried everything I've found to make it work yet, but I may just stick the store with that card back, we'll see. It worked, but no access to the super duper GPU in there, even for 2d acceleration at this point, a total loser. The basic machine is so fast it doesn't hurt anything except the OpenGL screen savers and that desktop eye candy yet (they won't run)...but hey, that wasn't free, and the issue seems to be the ATI drivers have some bugs on this whole series of cards. I'll install CUDA, their IDE for working with the GPU as a computer and see if it has more-intelligent error messages than the dumbed down stuff the normal code reports.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA


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