Frankenstein Lives!

[xartin]

Hands down the most badass server i've ever built

Some weeks work sucks... weeks with hardware like this just make everything worthwhile

Supermicro SC847E26-R1400U 36 bay 4U SAS2 server chassis
Super Micro Computer, Inc. - Products | Chassis | 4U | SC847E26-R1400UB

Supermicro X8DTU-F 5520 Intel Tylesburg Dual Xeon Motherboard
Super Micro Computer, Inc. - Products | Motherboards | Xeon Boards | X8DTU-F

2x X5650 Intel Xeon Processors
32GB ECC Registered 1333mhz DDR3 Kingston Memory
LSI 9260-8i SAS2 Raid controller
10x 2TB Seagate Constellation SAS2 enterprise hard drives

Pic below was with the SAS2 array configured in raid6 for testing purposes



Assembled Server Pics - still waiting for UPS to deliver the pcie riser card

[Snowy42]

I ENVY YOU!!!

The only things I ever get build requests for are ****ty home PC's on a budget... "OH GOD i3 SYSTEMS ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN MY CURRENT PC"

My day-to-day system builds usually involve the following specs

Intel i3-540
2gb of OEM poo ram (4gb if the user REALLY wants to fork out)
500gb drive
Generic 450W PSU (which is probably rated closer to 200W)
and whatever PoS motherboard everything will plug into (with onboard VGA of course!) - Usually Gigabyte around the $40 mark

If only I could get a decent server build

[Drarkan]

SOON My Monster will have all the parts I need and put her together!!! And soon it will be great! I've been looking at some of the dual processor supercomputer boards with 12 memory slots. Tempting. Not sure if they have ones with video card expansion slots though, might have to settle for one of the X58 standard boards, but the supercomputer boards are pretty sick!

[Tim]

Hey could you explain how the 2 memory banks worth with it being dual cpu, something about each able to only access one bank? How does that all work with the OS and apps?

[xartin]

If i recall my specifications correctly dual processor server motherboards such as this dedicate each bank of ram to a processor. the amd opteron's NUMA memory design was the among first to utilize a processor to processor hypertransport which allowed each processor to access the peer processor's memory bank which could also be classified as advanced memory interleaving.

Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA): Dual Processor AMD Opteron Platform Analysis in RightMark Memory Analyzer

The board used for this server uses an intel Tylesburg 5520 chipset. While the 5520 is significantly newer design the founding pricipals of memory interleaving are still utilized by the memory controller via 6.4 GT/s Quick Path Interconnect only available with 900 series intel i7's and 5500/5600 intel xeon's.

Noted that you do need a second processor installed to use the second memory bank which is bound to the secondary processor slot however the location of installed memory is entirely transparent to applications other than the usual highly convoluted 64bit hexadecimal memory addressing format I'll dare not try to describe as it would likely make my inner mathematician unleash primal rage

[Tim]

Ahh cool cool, sounds like a weird way of doing RAM, instead of 1 big RAM bank for both CPUs to use, instead, CPU #2 has to go through CPU #1 to access that RAM bank?

Do you think 1x application could use 100% of the RAM then?

[xartin]

with one or two processors.. absolutely