great bang-for the buck

[super gnu]

im often very sceptical of second hand machines, especially rackmount servers, and especially especially blade servers. as they are noisy and a pain to manage.. but check this offer out!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Prolian...item20fe21b0ce


that is 8 nodes, total *16* 6-core cpus at 2.6ghz, 3.05ghz turbo. , giving 192 threads, 48gb ram per node (384gb total) for £3600

i know they are not new cpus, but each has around 60% of the performance of a 3930k (what i use now)


im even tempted, but i dont have the power budget ( 3kw limit here in the south of italy)

- was imagining buying it and watercooling it to keep it quiet.. nice project until i realised id be spending £600+ just for the 16 cpu waterblocks.

[super gnu]

hmm cant seem to paste working link, it cuts it short..


-nope.. nope it works. ignore me i need to go to bed.

[Donald2B]

Check benchmarks to see what kind of performance you can expect from those processors and go from there. And yes, that machine will bring a whole new definition of LOUD! Haha

[super gnu]

i checked some generic benchmarks.. as stated they are around 60% as fast as my current 3930k's i paid circa £3500 for a pair of 3930k workstations (self build, when they were the latest and greatest)

assuming even 50% performance, its still 4x more grunt than my 2 workstations for the same price.

anyway, not a snowflakes chance in hell id buy it.. i dont have a soundproofed server room or enough free electricity.

i was just impressed at how much rendering power you could get for £3600.

[super gnu]

just found an obscure vray benchmark page where results are given for a dual xeon workstation with this processor, and also a 5960x.. the dual xeon is within a few seconds of the single 5960x

so this is more or less 8x 5960x for £3600


of course the issue (apart from heat, noise, electricity consumption, software etc) is the cost of upgrading the damn thing if you ever wanted to. buying 8 lots of 64/128gb ram is no joke ( i dont know if it has free slots) and even swappping the 8 old SAS hard drives for cheap SSds would cost 400-500 quid.


having said that, to get similar rendering power youd still need a few (expensive) machines, just not 8. so the problem isnt unique to this.

[super gnu]

hm ive just noticed those blades each have space for a gpu and a pcie x16 slot, currently filled with raid cards. interesting.

[Donald2B]

Boom!! Drop in some Titan X's or 980 and GPU rendering like a boss!

[super gnu]

might be fun trying to shoehorn titan-x'es into 1u blade servers.. but hey.. im handy with a hacksaw.

by way of a (pretty useless) comparison, very approximately, when using opencl, this box would render about as fast as 2x-3x titan x'es.. hehe.

[tricky]

So could you just stick this in any old rack, Cat5 to a switch, turn on a you are good to go?

[super gnu]

dont forget to put on ear defenders.


im sure youd need to do some fiddly setup first too.. installing your windows and software 8x for one thing. i assume they have a monitor socket on them so youd shuffle from one to the other, plug in keyboad mouse, dvd drive and monitor, setting up, then moving on to the next. im sure you could streamline that by ghosting an image to each drive etc..

but basically, yes.. its just 8 small dual xeon renderboxes.

ahh and when i mentioned needing to replace the ram being an issue, apparently each blade has 16 ram slots, so im guessing there are a few empty :P

[tricky]

dont forget to put on ear defenders.

Haha. Yes, I know about blades. We have a server room full of them!

[Donald2B]

I'll never forget the first time I built one of our nodes and fired it up for the first time at my desk to get everything setup before moving it into the server room. Holy hell it was loud! The other two people in my little area almost killed me! Hahahaha

[super gnu]

im surprised commercially available watercooled blades are not more common.. i guess the whole "fear of water" thing is too much of a barrier

[Donald2B]

We looking heavily into it...the problem comes down to you still need some type of radiator/chiller and by the time you factor in the staggering amount for something like that, it was MUCH cheaper to go the traditional route with standard rack and cooling solutions.

If it wasn't such a niche product and more readily available, I think that the cost would come down to more reasonable prices.

NOTE: I'm talking about when we were looking at building our entire farm that way with high density computing solutions, not just a couple standard computers in a room.

[Neilg]

there's always this...