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Altix XE? - Dylanear - 03-30-2019

I'm probably going to be buying 5 SGI Altix XE340 blades locally. These are basically just Xeon 1U twin dual CPU blades, surely made by some other manufacturer and branded SGI sometime around 2009. But they do have infiniband ports! 

Is there a particular place on this forum where it's proper to discuss these given they are not MIPS, not even Itanium? 

Anyone have any experience with them? 

https://irix7.com/techpubs/007-5536-001.pdf

RE: Altix XE? - Raion - 03-31-2019

I don't mind if you discuss hardware related stuff here but software discussion for these should go into Other Unix or Off Topic

RE: Altix XE? - Dylanear - 04-02-2019

Understood, I wouldn't get Linux all mixed up in Mips forums. No worries. Smile

They were dropped off tonight. They are basically Supermicros. Supermicro motherboards, shared power supply. SGI BIOS, and SGI front cover. But it does have the cube logo! These particular units do not have the infiniband ports it turns out, looks like an empty spot on the mother boards where that'd be soldered, the port is just an empty hole.

Chasis looks to be the Supermicro SuperChassis 808T-1200B, but with the SGI vented cover over the removable drives.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/1U/808/SC808T-1200B

Motherboard is Supermicro X8DTT-F, Supermicro X8DTT-F-SG007 specifically.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DTT-F.cfm

I believe these were also the motherboard(s) used in the "Octane III" deskside box.

Looks like I can put 3.3ghz quad core 45nm Xeon W5590 (130watt) in quite cheap, so I may do that and ditch the 2.2Ghz quad cores (E5520, 80 watt). They have half of 12 memory slots filled with 2GB sticks. I may take half the 10 systems and move their RAM to the others and make those 24GB systems and then put 6 8GB stick in the empty ones for 5 48GB and 5 24GB systems total. They have 250GB spinny Seagate system disks and the other bay is empty, so SSDs maybe someday.

They have 6+ of 40mm fans per system 2 in the PS, so that's 14 screaming fans in each blade. I've only had one system up and it was basically on the more pleasant side of a small vacuum cleaner. All 10 systems in the 5 blade stack all on at once must sound a bit jet like and I'm not sure I have a wall outlet with enough amps for them all under load. I can hope a 15 amp circuit might keep them going under load? But maybe not with the 3.3ghz hex core procs?! Wink

I'll get some pics up soon.

RE: Altix XE? - Dylanear - 04-10-2019

Here's some images if anyone is curious. The Quadro is a modern P620 I put in there to get a 4K display on one of the nodes.

   

   

   

RE: Altix XE? - dexter1 - 04-12-2019

A Quadro P620 has a decent amount of cuda cores, 512 tbe. Shame it's only 2 GB memory.

Nice score on those rack servers, btw. Or should i say: "nice rack"  :-)

RE: Altix XE? - Dylanear - 04-12-2019

(04-12-2019, 10:15 AM)dexter1 Wrote:  A Quadro P620 has a decent amount of cuda cores, 512 tbe. Shame it's only 2 GB memory.

Nice score on those rack servers, btw. Or should i say: "nice rack"  :-)

Yeah, the Quadro is no powerhouse, but it's more than up to the task for this case. I wanted basic, full featured OpenGL and mostly, just a full 4k desktop. My choices were a bit limited given the small slot it needed to fit in and that there was no easy way to connect auxiliary PCI-E power. The P620 was pretty cheap and fit the bill perfectly. I could have spent a bit more and got more memory, but any serious OpenGL use will take place on my desktop workstation with a RTX2080.

I should have my batch of 20 3.3ghz CPUs before too long, we'll see if the power and heat of those things will be problematic. I'd really like to put a bunch more RAM in them, but we'll see, while the DDR3 ECC ram isn't expensive, there's a LOT of slots to fill on this rack. 

I wanted a Tezro, but this will have to keep me entertained for now. Tezros ain't cheap or easy to find! Eventually I'll get a one or two of my dozen or so MIPS workstations out of storage in California, I haven't played with an Irix machine since they went into storage a decade ago. Ideally an Octane, but an Indy XZ may be a better choice to put in my carry on luggage. Wink

RE: Altix XE? - Dylanear - 05-20-2019

I've got a network switch and KVM on there. Still just playing with trying different OS installs at the moment. 

Ideally I'd add a bunch of RAM, DDR3 registered is actually quite cheap, but there's a LOT of empty slots to fill on this stack of blades. And ideally I'd find some affordable SSDs as boot, swap drives, but that's going to take some searching and my budget for this project is very low at the moment after what I've already spent.

RE: Altix XE? - Dylanear - 03-03-2020

Power supply info for reference.

   

RE: Altix XE? - ghost180sx - 04-16-2020

Even though these are not "true" SGIs, that is still a fantastic x86-64 cluster! I'm sure the hardware is high quality and reliable if it's based on Supermicro!

What dimensions are those? If you said they are blades, I assume they are narrower than 19"?
Do you have any plans to put them in some sort of enclosure?

RE: Altix XE? - Xav101 - 04-23-2020

Those chips are either going to be Nehalem or Westmere, and I'm guessing the ones you ordered are either 130W or 135W TDP. I'll admit TDP is a bit of a weird number, but as a point of comparison my one Westmere machine is a dual E5649 machine (6 cores each, 2.53GHz) and the chips are rated at a TDP of 80W. Under full load (100% usage on all 24 threads using folding@home) the ilo3 reports a peak usage of ~280W for the whole system and an average usage of ~270W. I don't know how much of that is the CPUs and how much is other components, but I don't have many DIMMs so the second biggest draw is probably the 4x300GB 2.5" 10k SAS disks. That being said, both CPUs are probably easily over 200W draw under full load.

It's definitely a cool system to have, but if you're actually going to be running this constantly I'd suggest buying something newer because of the efficiency gains over the last decade. I'd guess this system will easily pull a few kW if you turn them all on, which you definitely don't want to be paying the power bill for if it's running 24/7.