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What Does a $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway?
justechn writes "Tom's Hardware has an article about custom PC maker Puget Systems, who had just finished a custom $16,000 PC for one of their clients. So what exactly goes into a $16,000 system? How about: Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, and Cooler Master Stacker 810 case. In addition to all that hardware, it also runs very quiet and very cool. The temperature of the CPUs is 36 C at idle, 45 C at load."
Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, andCooler Master Stacker 810 case. By a remarkable coincidence, these are almost exactly the hardware requirements for Windows 8!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
'nuff said.
Need all that bandwidth for 5,000 channel audio I guess.
Also... Windows? Really?
...that's 96.8 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively.
~Philly
But will it blend?
With all those fans and drives, it can't be very quiet unless it is in another room.
$16,000 bought you a high-end Compaq desktop. Not a server, only one CPU, one disk, etc.. And that was when $16k was real money!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I thought those were the bare minimum specs for the Crysis sequel?
That's one heck of an audio editing machine*. Any pros want to fill the rest of us in on why they'd need that much power? Is ProTools really that demanding?
--- Mr. DOS
* To me, a DAW is the only thing I can really see this being useful for from a spec perspective - no video cards, and yet a good sound card and extremely quiet.
But does it run.........
Yeah mod me to hell and back.
Now can we PLEASE get rid of that "Macs cost more than Windows" meme? :)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Re: another poster, maybe they forgot to mention the video card, because it would be be ordinary.)
I get a kick out of the Time Value of computers. $16,000 feels like a high flown retail price that will tank.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
But will it run Crysis?
What is the point of the two WD 300GB drives? They provide 300GB usable disk space, while the system has another 4TB of usable space. They are RAID1 -- just like the pair of Samsung drives. Are they just for show? Or to fill more of the available drive bays? Perhaps the builder could have covered the case with diamonds to make it more expensive?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
From SuperMicro and price what it would be like to max it out on RAM and processors. You'd need a custom case for it to make it a workstation pc rather than a rackmount. Comes to about $20k with 96G of RAM and 4 6-core Xeons -- still less than what Dilbert spent for his dream system.
sigh I guess it's my turn for the mandatory crap posts.
Beowulf cluster... Vista... Crysis...
Seriously? What would be the point of a system like that? Rather, what is the purpose of a system like that that can't be served by a cheaper alternative?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
With dual 30" screens and a massive amount of storage!
But how about running Linux on that machine ? Can we see some benchmarks on that please ?
Geez, for $16K you'd think they'd be smart enough to do RAID-5 in 2**n + 1 disks - as in 3, 5, 9, etc.
at least some end product of the Billions of dollars in bail-out money....
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Wow, 16 cores. Finally a box fit for Gentoo! Therefore, step one: lose the Windows Server.
Step two: Lose the hardware RAID card. Software RAID is way better.
Tom's Hardware have been swooning over SSDs, partly Intel's SLC editions, partly IoFusion's PCI express monster, showing several times that one of Intel's SSDs can easily keep up with a pair of harddrives in RAID0 - and yet when they go all out on a system like this, they don't even choose one as the system drive?
How very inconsistent.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
scnr
Sadly you can't use it to run much of anything except PACS software. I'd love to give flight sim a whirl if quadro cards were good for something besides rendering.
1) Single Cooling Loop - with 4 quad-core processors, this machine could net much better bang-for-the-decibel out of a dual loop system - one loop handling one pair of processors, second loop handling the other pair. Optimally speaking, a quad-loop system (individual loops per processor) would net even better results.
2) Video cards have fans, too! - Find yourself a video card that uses cooling pipes or similar technology, rather than fans. Those little fans spinning really fast make _LOTS_ of noise.
3) Speaking of noise - WD300 Raptors? Congrats, you just put the noisiest modern hard drives in a machine "built to be quiet" - if no expense was to be spared, why is this thing not outfitted with Solid State Disks???
4) Problems with the liquid - in addition to number one above, the reservoir is mounted at the bottom of the case? That's an amateur mistake right there. Reservoir at top of case = any air infiltration gets trapped at the reservoir. Additionally, the "angled barbs" are 90-degree bends - not exactly what you want in a low-flow system, backpressure is going to kill that pump, or at least cause it to whine incessantly, even at lower flow settings.
5) PSU - Corsair HX 1000W PSU - why not a PC Power and Cooling ultra-quiet unit, or a SilenX-modded solid cap PSU? Instead, they opt for a PSU rated at 57dBm?
Amateur job, Puget, very amateur. If anyone feels the need to build a super-quiet box, they really should shop around and look into these type of issue, or suffer sever disappointment.
E
This is common FUD and the same was said of Linux until a few years ago. Don't confuse application scalability with OS scalability. Windows 2003 and 2008 server scale well and properly support NUMA systems (2000 and NT did not)... however most applications are not written or run in a scalable manner. The OS has no knowledge of an applications threading or memory access patterns and unless the application takes some proactive measures, performance will suffer on any platform. And.. I don't see what's so hard about right clicking an app in program manager and clicking "set affinity". Affinity can be permanently set with the imagecfg utility.
for those whom have seen this, im sure many of you, the rig for that reportedly cost £24k, as was said in the b3ta thread where it was posted, i dont know if this was mentioend elsewhere where the video was posted, ill try and dig it up
Proof?
Oh, that's right, you don't have any because he's right.
does it run windows vista ok ?
Well it's good to know that WOW must be compatible with windows 2008 server. But does it really take that much space to install?
It was purchased in the late nineties for a 3D artist at a dotcom; the company folded a year or so later. The few employees that stuck around received hardware in lieu of their final paychecks.
Dual 333 MHZ P3s. Nvidia Riva 2. Half a gig of ram. Dual 10k RPM 14GB U160 SCSI drives attached to a Adaptec 19160 (The 19160 *still* sells for at $100, 10 years later. Who knows how much it cost at the time...). High speed (for the time) Plextor SCSI CDRom reader and writer.
With a few minor upgrades here and there (video card, a little more ram, a few replaced power supplies), it remained my main system til about 2005. Even played WoW on it. The only real reason I don't use it anymore? Lack of 48-bit LBA support -- couldn't stick a drive larger than 137 gig on it, which in this day and age, just doesn't quite cut it for a desktop.
Replaced it about a year ago -- picked up $300 worth of parts at Fry's, and built a machine that out-spec'd the original in every way, except drive speed.
Those SCSI drives would still be sweet, if they weren't so damn small.
For my sixteen grand I want it in a nice wooden cabinet, or to look like the bridge of the Enterprise, or... *anything* but an off-the-shelf case.
$16 bought you a high-end draft horse. Not a show-pony, only one bridle, one carriage, etc.. And that was when $16 was real money!
Now git offa my lawn!
'Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, and Cooler Master Stacker 810 case.'
The specs needed to make windows perform just go up and up eh? Could this handle vista or just the trimmed down server platform?
before the same dorks that are impressed by installing 10 KW audio amplifiers in cars decided to bring the same thinking to PC building?
No, not for personal use or gaming. It will run Linux with a Xen kernel and is intended to replace nearly all of our old individual servers. Everything from the piddly servers like DNS, LDAP, Kerberos, and our minimal web services to the AFS db servers. No file services on that beast though, I'm not crazy - no disk I/O-RAM access contention please. My plan is to copy an entire OS image of /usr into a RAMFS filesystem in the top level Dom 0 domain and then cross mount that as RO in each Xen instance. We'll also stick small SQL server and other dbs copies in local tempfs RAMdisks too. Everything in RAM will be snapshotted and saved to physical disk periodically. Those deltas will then be copied to a remote fail-over server periodically as well.
It should be both reasonably stable and blindingly fast.
Another machine will handle AFS and some NFS file services, which has up to sixteen SATA disks attached to two 8 port 3-Ware RAID cards, thus spreading I/O load across two PCI buses. No, we don't need all that disk space - we need the I/O performance. It too should be reasonably fast. We're gearing up to connect that either by several channel bonded 1Gb to a CISCO 6509, or - if we're lucky - we'll just go 10Gb optical. We'll see how the finances work out there.
This is how departmental IT is done. Or, at least, it's how it *should* be done. I spent less than $25K on these two computers and they will replace well a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of accumulated hardware purchased over the last ten years and now fully depreciated.
what do you call it when cowards argue vaguely with each other?
...and go back in time!
If you want to see a $16,000 computer why not just go to the Apple online store? You should be able to get there pretty easily by maxing out a Mac Pro. :)
No, unfortunately, its not just FUD.
You can bench it yourself. With Windows, doubling the processors gives about 1.4 times a single processor's performance.
With almost any flavor of nix, its much closer to 1.9. With some kernel options in linux its even higher.
Adding processors beyond 2, the return diminishes, but much more quickly on Windows than Linux.
Microsoft has continually been spinning the story that they scale well into huge processor/core counts but in every instance comparative tests show that they don't.
I thought they had made progress on this front. But when benching 2008 Server against OpenSuse on a quad core machine I was blown away by the difference. And further tests reveal that Windows 7, running two cores outperforms Vist ultimate running 4 cores.
You can't handwave this away by reading Microsoft fud papers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
One would have thought after that much cash and research that he would have ran the CPU cooling in parallel rather then in series. I know water cooling is better then air, but the last CPU in the series will be getting all the heat from the other three CPUs. More tubing would have been needed and it wouldn't have looked as clean, but the CPUs would be getting roughly the same cold water in. the article says that he can adjust the pump speed. They like it at 30% so it is not loud. The over all temps do not look that bad. I did not see what each CPU individual temps were in the article. Cool mod though.
What a complete waste of slashdot space!
WTF is this article trying to get at anyway? It is certainly not the most expensive machine you can buy.. 2 minutes on dell website gets you into the $50,000+ range. It is certainly not the fastest. So what the F*** is the author getting at?
NOTHING!
I am not impressed at all!
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
Ohshitohshitohshit---
RUN!
In the early '90s, $20k wasn't an unusual price for a tricked-out Mac. Machines like the IIfx and Quadra 950 cost damn near five figures in base spec; high-end video cards and accellerators weren't cheap either.
6 years later, I got such a machine for free...
The RAID5 is probably planned for longer term bulk storage since it can be a tad slower than Raid1.
RAID 5 isn't worth it. If you want to put four drives in a RAID, use RAID 10. Writes are faster on RAID 10 than on RAID 5, and if two drives fail, there's only a 33 percent chance of needing to restore everything from backup, compared to 100 percent for RAID 5.
Get a bunch of $300 Acer Aspire One netbooks, each with WiFi, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Hard drive, and distribute the work...
I think that 50 of them would be pretty quick in a Beowolf cluster. (Well... an XP gaggle... but I digress)
Uhhh... I've got 8 cores chugging along quite happily here.
Some of us actually use software that uses multiple cores quite nicely thank you.
Damn, and to think I just bought a similarly spec'd Sun server for $12,000.
In one year I can build a PC for $1000 that outperforms this for CPU-bound jobs. Give me 2 years for something I/O-bound.
I'm not hand waving it away. Which benchmarks, which applications? I can find benchmarks that have Opteron's outperforming Xeon's and vice-a-versa. There are benchmarks where Vista outperforms Windows 7 and ... again... vica versa.
Making blanket statements like "Windows doesn't scale" is FUD. It's correct to say that Samba scales much better on linux than Windows 2003 File Server does on the same hardware. However, Oracle Database server scales equally well on both platforms.
As always... use the right tool for the job and make an informed decision. Which it sounds like you did for your environment. However, having supported Java App Servers, Seibel, Oracle, MS-SQL, etc. in HP/HA environments I can tell your blanket statement is not correct.
http://www.necam.com/servers/ft/320Fc.cfm
The NEC Fault Tolerant servers start out at $26,000 and go up from there, what's the big deal about a $16,000 server?
My Sig is Sauer.
With $16000 they couldn't afford DDR3? It says in the article that they use DDR2-667 which seems a little to "standard" for this kind of computer.
I had to ask myself, WHY would anyone spend this kind of money on this machine, other then a good E-Peen stroking?
I still haven't found an answer.
It is total over-kill for every single thing that comes to mind.
Unless the guy is some kind of closet physicist that likes running complex models for a hobby, I just don't get it.
Even for gaming, it is about $13,000 of overkill.
Can ANYONE give me an example of a valid, non-Epeen stroking reason to build such a machine?
Woosh!
That fast, hm? And that was just the virusscanner...
are multi-cpu mother boards likely to leave the server market and enter the consumer market at anypoint (soon?)
*Hey buddy, look what I ordered.. the coolest machine ever build to date.. Spend 16k on this little beasty.. bet you are jealous now huh?*
Cool, I bet this can run Crysis pretty damn fast!
*erm, no.....*
Pretty insane if you ask me.. Even if you don't have a use for a graphicscard.. you'd still have some pride right? :)
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Sadly you can't use it to run much of anything except PACS software. I'd love to give flight sim a whirl if quadro cards were good for something besides rendering.
A Quadro card gets slower benchmarks than the nearly-identical non-Quadro version, but the cards also tend to have a boatload of memory bandwidth. My Quadro 2700M is more than capable of high-quality gaming; I haven't tried Crysis or anything but I can play HL2 over 60 fps at 1920x1080 with full detail and AA turned up all the way. My monitor is an HDTV at 1080p via DVI.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
[citation needed]
Please explain where the numbers 1.4 and 1.9 come from. I stopped believing you the moment those magic number popped up.
Mammography
It figures someone on slashdot would spend 150K for a computer that allows you to look at breasts.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if a single Java instance on Windows can use more than 1GB of ram yet?
Where is that money going? It's already depreciated and I bet you can get the same specs in a year for a fourth the price. You think anyone is going to buy that computer for more than was paid? No, neither do I.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Tandy CoCo II
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Yet it at least tripled in value when somebody installed Linux...
There's a typo in the subtitle: what's a 'liceses'?
What I'd really like is to see a gallery of these super PC's from 5 or 10 years ago.
A $10,000 system with 2 GB of RAM and a RAID set up (these things ALWAYS need RAID !!) with 50 GB of storage...
Or a $10,000 system featuring dual 3dfx voodoo cards in SLI configuration and blah blah blah.
Then we laugh and realize we can do better than that today for a few hundred dollars.
Those systems are all over-priced and a HUGE waste of money when you consider how soon it will be obsolete.
Whoever ordered the system in this article is an idiot.
Seriously? the cooling system is in series to all the processors!! And talk about an after though for the radiator. Ugly as sin and awkward as hell.
You will be able to find them cheap on craiglist or free on freecycle.
$22,555.90
That includes all of the software and display options on there as well, which may not be fair. But that's the grand total for a fully loaded Mac Pro.
I have access to much higher end hardware than this at work (24-core, 128 GB RAM, 8 ultra-fast SLC SSDs). Hardware that is even capable of running a high-end video card and gaming, if I really felt like it.
That doesn't make it a gaming rig.
(Besides, the new Mac Pro, stock, would be faster at gaming in Windows... And faster at video production... And faster running database work...)
"Oooh! Ahhh! That's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."
â"Dr. Ian Malcom, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
Ah... probably some minesweeper in win2008svr...
Yep, thats just the thing you need.
NO SIG
Why not do some research, where you will find I was being generous.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/labnotes/workflow-transaction-times.html
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Just go to the customize page(http://www.pugetsystems.com/configure.php?app_type=g&sys_type=l). I selected the most expensive component for every option and racked the price up to $19,255. Just what you'd expect from any bloke choosing them most expensive components.
To bad their web servers don't run on anything comparable, although it has been a long time since i saw them.
Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB...
Or spend $300 on a celeron-m end of line laptop and install Debian.
That's a SPECIFIC application, which was not performance optimized, even by Microsoft's own admission.
The next version of that APPLICATION, released as part of .NET 4.0 has "10x" the performance. That SCREAMS unoptimized to me.
I've seen benchmarks of properly multi-threaded applications like video and image rendering software scale 1.9x or better on Windows.
Realistically, the NT kernel has something like a 1% overhead, if that, especially for CPUs other than the primary. User-mode applications can cheerfully use 100% of each core, the kernel will not get in the way, so why would you think scalability is anything less than 1.9x for the second core over the first one?!? Do you seriously think there's some task it's running on that core at 50% load ALL OF THE TIME? Or that it'll schedule 50% of the time and throw the rest away?
Even if you get into inefficient applications that do a lot of locks, message passing, and I/O, take a look at SQL Server scalability. My experience is that it only begins to lose steam at 16 cores or so, and that's probably an application issue as well.
There's people running Windows on 128 and even 256 CPU machines (google "HP Superdome").
It looks like crap. There, I saved you from having to click through all the article pages.
Realistically, the NT kernel has something like a 1% overhead, if that, especially for CPUs other than the primary. User-mode applications can cheerfully use 100% of each core, the kernel will not get in the way,
That's the most ridiculous thing I've seen on Slashdot all month.
You think just because task manager doesn't show you kernel time that its not doing anything?
Go back ad read the rest of the article.
Until Vista and Win7, Even Microsoft admitted that Windows was a poor platform for multiprocessor utilization. This was largely due to spinlocks.
Windows 7 is way better than Vista in this regard, and Vista is better than XP/2k. Win7 is expected to scale to 256x without wasting too much resources.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Server can use 4 cpu sockets vista / xp can not.
As for the sound card just to have basic sound? some 2 and 4 cpus board don't have on board sound / crap on board sound.
From MS Specs for Max CPUs and RAM on Vista Ultimate and 2008
Vista Ultimate
Maximum:
2 Physical CPUs (Multi-Core + Hyper-threading supported)
4 GB of system memory - RAM with 32-bit (x86) CPU
128 GB of system memory - RAM with 64-bit (x64) CPU
Windows 2008 Standard Edition
Maximum:
4 Physical CPUs (Multi-Core + Hyper-threading supported)
4 GB of system memory - RAM with 32-bit (x86) CPU
32 GB of system memory - RAM with 64-bit (x64) CPU
This also explains why only 32GBs of RAM. Standard only allows 32GBs. The Enterprise, Datacenter, Itanium versions of 2008 can take up to 2TB of RAM in 64-bit.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
That may well be disk I/O related. I've been hitting similar performance problem s on Windows 2003 lately and am pretty sure it's down to disk I/O giving poorer performance than expected.
Follow me
Actually, it depends. Windows does NOT scale nearly as well as Linux is serious NUMA hardware, which means > 1024 cores. Nor does it scale to >1024 VMs (IBM z-Series)... actually, it can't even RUN on a z-Series, so let's skip that.
On the usual range of cores per server (i.e. less than 32), it is about the same.
Oh, btw, there is serious work ongoing on Linux to suport more than 4096 cores.
A hulking noise and heat generator with lots of cores, lots of memory, and lots of disk space is soooo yesterday
For $16,000 I expect a PC that is the size of an iPod; has a heads up display in my prescription glasses; has a webcam on the glasses bridge; runs roughly equivalent to a nice desktop; excellent and well integrated voice recognition and commands, can connect to the net with wifi, 3g, phone, etc.; has gps; and has a 12 hour battery life; and has a decent and useable operating system.
Of course to come up with $16k in cash right now I'd have to sell my car, and the turn tricks for a few months.
-- QED
Really makes you wonder, what's that sound card for, considering they're running windows server and all. Oh I'm sorry, it's there because it's expensive. My bad.
Yeah, no shit. What exactly is the other RAID 1 setup doing for me? RAID the RAID?
If you have two RAID 1 setups somehow backing each other up, do you end up with a RAID 2, or an inverted black hole of data that could delete my Gmail account?
Yup, things that make you go "what the hell..."
That spec really struck me, because I spend a lot of time documenting a multi-CPU systems, and its maximum RAM for a 4-CPU setup is 256GB. But of course, it's a server.
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school. The thoroughly incompetent Web design teacher had a very simple method of ordering computers: go to Dell's website, build-to-order the most expensive computer, and select the most expensive of every option.
I burst her bubble by telling her that the school district had standardized on one OptiPlex and one Latitude. She had a screaming fit because she couldn't get some overpriced Inspiron that lets you listen to CDs with the cover closed. The district purchasing director said she could have it if she could justify needing that for job. So she didn't get it.
This $16,000 WS2003 box sounds like something a trust-fund baby would get.
Great, now we'll be hearing from all the Mac-fanboys how much more cost-effective Macs are because they've got lower TCO than this $16K monstrosity. From previous experience, we'll be hearing about this for the next 10-15 years.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
...Why would anyone choose to run Windows 2008 Server as their desktop OS...
Well, rumor has it he was going to run Windows Vista, but quickly realized that even $16K worth of hardware still only rates a 4.3 on the Vista perform-o-meter.
...and if this is not a desktop then why the fancy sound card?
Again, that's an easy one. Have you ever heard how beautiful a BSOD on Server OS is these days? No? That's because no one puts sound cards in servers anymore. You should check it out one time, rumor has it they actually hired John Williams to write the score for a page fault. Damn thing is even THX-certified.
This build is like Chewbacca, who is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense. I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense!
Yup, we're all in agreement. While they were at it racking up the $$$, they should have just contracted Porsche to design the damn case. Would have likely broke the $20K "barrier"
...does it run linux ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Try not to speak authoritatively about things you clearly know nothing about:
http://www.rungeek.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/taskmanager2.jpg
And if you want detail:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768048.aspx
The "poor utilization" in the article is a relative term. For most apps running under Windows, scalability to multiple CPUs is not hampered by the kernel. There have been improvements to I/O and networking on many-CPU servers, but it's just a fine tuning, not a massive leap forward.
600% scalability on 8 CPUs - this is SQL 7 on NT4 mind you!
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/technology/images/performancepreview-chart1.gif
Is that a nice linear scalability graph of a Windows application I see?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_oGCeAi-2i3Q/RuWC4LFEeQI/AAAAAAAAAD0/7B6g8tYUVac/s1600-h/BarcaWinrar.gif
But clearly I'm an idiot. I run Windows XP 64-bit on a quad-core CPU, and I really do get 4x the WinRar compression speed. I've timed it, because I use it to compress my backups, so it matters. It's 4x faster. Am I an idiot? Do I have difficulty telling time? You tell me.
Sounds like Microsoft has a new recommended requirements list for Vista. I could buy one reasonably Vista/Server 2008 box or get 20 1986 Toyota Celica GT-S's. I think I'll take those lovely Celicas. Or get 17 of them and one nice box that can run reasonably written software faster than that beast would run Windows 2008.
They still won't fail at the same time.
The stress of rebuilding might make it more likely, especially with terabyte-sized drives taking six hours to write to the whole 1 TB drive, and the speed of other writes to that array starts to suffer even more than in normal RAID 5.
http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/5/181517/original/COMPLETE_02.JPG
So.... that means it'll benchmark about the same as a pimped out 486 running DOS?
I just built an 8 core Opteron with 16 gig of ram and 2TB of raid for only a thousand bucks!
So they have twice the capacity and but costs 16 times as much!??!
I can build two of these and it will have better scale and redundancy for 8 times less than they have.
Someone didn't do their homework...or they have a budget to dump or else they will loose it next year...businesses can sometimes be so wasteful.
That's part of what's wrong with the economy...a lot of people don't treat their employer's funds like it's their own money. I always have...I guess that's why I'm still employed and getting raises!
When I want to see a great $16K+ computer, I just look at my desktop PC (a Mac).
I would have replaced the drives with a single RAID 0 of the Intel X-25e SLC SSDs (@ 32gb each for a total of 256 for your system drive) then a second raid card with 8x Velociraptors in a RAID5 array.
I would also dump the watercooling for a phase change cooling system as well. Not only would the system be vastly quieter, it would also be a bit cooler, should you chose to overclock.
If I was to build this system in a few months, the 6gb SAS should be out, and Id probably swap the raptors for those. The advantage would also be I could increase my storage as needed because of the scalability of SAS.
The caveat would be this system would cost MUCH more then 16k... probably in the realm of 25k-30k. But you MIGHT be able to run Vista with Aero or Crysis at full :)
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
OK, it is several servers. An the kick-ass shit is the storage. EMC Symmetrix DMX-3000 and DMX-4. 135TB raw, 45 usable. 3-way split mirrors. Total enterprise class shit. Unfortunately, it is only good to run something like Oracle, and the video cards suck.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Depends on what you need it for. Video rendering CGI for ILM? They could probably use this for awhile, until the next ultimate build comes along. And that's just one application. What about storm modelling? You know, tornados and such. Simulations to figure out how they work so you can figure out early warning systems to maybe save some lives or something. Sure, you could probably model parts of a storm on a Commodore 64, if somebody'd write the software for it, but wouldn't you prefer answers in hours rather than decades? Storm survivors who otherwise would have died would thank you for that. How much do you put on a human life?
See above.
Now, doing this to play solitare is ridiculous. For what I use a computer for, it's about 5 orders of magnitude of overkill. Your mileage may vary...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Clearly, when one has $16,000 to spend on a PC, they have "better" taste as well - they probably have fugly bags with little G's or LV's all over them too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I wonder if they spent the extra $29 and had GeekSquad do a "New Computer" tune up?
I build a faster computer which only costed a small percentage of that Opteron-Beast:
An Intel5400-Board with two 4Ghz QuadXeons and two GT280. Ok, it only has 16GB and four drives but this would be easily corrected nowadays.
I personally use an Intel5000XVN-Board with two 2,5Ghz QuadXeons, 16GB RAM, two 500 Harddrives and an Geforce 8800, waiting for the GT2xx-Line to become mature and passive cooled ---- BECAUSE MY WHOLE SYSTEM IS PASSIVELLY COOLED BESIDES ONE SINGLE 40CM FAN RUNNING AT 50RPM.
The whole System did cost a lot less than â2000 and consists of standard hardware allover.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I don't get why this monster needs to be quiet. Since, as mentioned, the video bandwidth is not important just put the darn thing in some sort of mini server room (eg. the corner of your basement) and remote into it. If you can afford a $16k PC you must have a massive pad with lots of far away corners ideal to put this in. Hell put a rack in there and do it right with server grade hardware instead of this mickey mouse hack. Even if video was an issue you can go a long way (~50ft) even without going optical and get decent video bandwidth. Many more cost effective ways to go other than this liquid cooled abomination which will depreciate real quick.
You can play some serious Quake II on that at some ridiculous frame rate!!
I just configured a DL580 G5 tower at HP.COM. With four 6-core processors and 256GB of RAM fully populated with 16 300GB SAS drives, Dual P800 SAS controllers and the usual goodies you're looking at $70,000. And that's before you buy a decent graphics card and a monitor.
No, it's not Vista compatible and it won't run Aero without additional hardware.
BTW, it would make a lousy media center PC too. Fans sound like a helicopter, the lights dim when you turn it on. On the upside if you put a couple decent graphics cards in it and install Linux, you can watch 100 videos at the same time.
Since when is expensive hardware a big deal for /.? It's much more difficult to make the hardware inexpensive.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Your experience is typical of people running crappy offbrand RAID solutions or motherboard RAID. Believe it or not RAID has become the standard in the server room for good reasons. With a good battery backed write cache, a decent controller, and reasonable attention to failed media RAID 5 or 6 arrays should never suffer catastrophic failure.
Of course if you are using RAID 5 with three 1.5TB drives from the same batch under common load you should be aware that at the drive End Of Warranty (3 years) it takes more time to rebuild the array after a drive swap than the Mean Time To Failure of the other two drives. You can predict how that story ends.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
to go to there.
One of today's dollars is equivalent to 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars. No, wait. That was February. 120 Gen4 Zimbabwe newdollars. No, that was before lunch. 140 Gen4 Zimbabwe newdollars. Buy it now before they're all gone!
You know, I bought myself a trillion Zim Gen 2 dollars, back when that was still enough to buy a cup of coffee. I'm keeping it as a memento. These days it's harder to get rid of than a pallet of Franklins in Baghdad.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What would twice as much money bought me 10 years ago? Then I realize I can probably build a better computer than it for 1/20 the cost today. It isn't really an investment when you buy a supercharged computer, but more of a passing fling.
God spoke to me.
Can it run Crysis on Vista?
Windows server is only $800 for a 5-client license... and $960 for a 10-client license. This is expensive by most OS standards (even OSX Server is only $500 for a 10-client license), but its still only a small fraction of the total cost of the computer, $16K.
Nice anti-MS joke, but technically, it's off the mark.
Why go with Raptors or SATA at all if you have that sort of budget? It wouldn't be much more to choose FC drives instead, and get much better throughput. Raid 5? Why that choice? was it because the raid card wasn't capable of something else?
System built for silence? Yet they use 120mm fans instead of a single larger, quieter, and higher flowing fan?
They mounted the radiator to the case using brass standoffs - with no shock isolation, thereby transferring all vibration from those 9 fans right into the case.
Everything about this rig is amateur. Its cool only in that someone spent that much money on commodity hardware - with a bit more research, this system would have been much more capable and quieter..
In pure performance what is better? 1 pc of 16000, 2pcs of 8000, 4 pcs of 4000, 8 pcs of 2000?
Mmmm...
There are various strategies to reduce failure on your raid, and to ensure that N+1 drives don't fail in a period where >N failure results in catastrophic data loss. The data is far more valuable than the equipment, so it's best to be sure. There are more factors than you imply in your post, so of course the best advice is "know what the >?#@ you're doing."
You are correct that unbatching your drives helps. So does staggering their incorporation, or various types of wear variegation. Despite your level these are real issues. All spinning drives eventually suffer catastrophic failure. SSDs typically have a more graceful failure mode, but they still fail eventually. If your job involves not managing drives but managing the information stored on them, these are important issues to you.
Of course the best course depends on your application. If I had 10000 desktops and ten server rooms around the world and 100 GB of essential data that must not be lost (like for example, the formula for stuff to make nuclear missiles), I'd store an encrypted copy on every desktop in addition to the steps I took in the server room.
And if you're at the top of your tree: I've been screaming this for 20 years and people still don't get it. If you're going to use desktop computers in your infrastructure, they're resources. Desktop computers are not dumb terminals. If you use these resources correctly you can get distributed execution and distributed storage in addition to the other utility that desktops provide, often at zero or minimal cost. You have a supercomputer and you don't even know it. You have a free SAN that can store a petabyte. It's idle and it always will be. That's wasteful.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thanks dude. I was going to tell IceBike that he clearly didn't actually know what he was talking about, but you've done that job much better than I would have.
Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5.
What a crap. Just throw in two 15k SAS drives for system in RAID-1 (if you so eager for mirroring) and four 1TB drives in RAID-10 - it will be much faster
what kind of insensitive clod would buy a machine like that and put windows on it? what a waste of resources! with xen or kvm you can make twenty or more servers out of it and will never have to reboot for the next ten years or so. this really makes me cry. what kind of people would do something like that? barbarians!
Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.
Just to make sure I went to Apple.com and fully loaded one (to include server software) - and yes it is...
"The OS has no knowledge of an applications threading or memory access patterns and unless the application takes some proactive measures, performance will suffer on any platform" - by thesandbender (911391) on Friday March 13, @05:34PM (#27186637)
How do you figure that?
E.G.-> The OS' process scheduler subsystem in Microsoft's Windows NT-based OS family (Windows NT 3.5x- 4.x, 2000/XP/Server 2003/VISTA/Server 2008/Windows 7) is aware of how many threads (smallest atomic unit of execution on Microsoft OS') an application has &, that is all it needs!
I.E.-> & even taskmgr.exe can show anyone that much, as to how many independent threads of execution an app has...
(The OS & its process scheduler core/kernel component subsystem has to know how many there are in order to send threads of execution that an application has across the least saturated CPU (physical, or core) present, assuming the other CPU's present are @ or nearing 100% cpu cycles saturation).
APK
P.S.=> This is done by the OS, & for ANY multithreaded application, & no "SetProcessAffinity" type API calls (explicit multithreaded apps that do all the checks for CPU's present, & schedule their own thread executions across them as needed) required... multiple threads of execution designed apps (that use what I call "implicit multithreaded design") are really all that is required here... apk
Not advised, while this rig might finally get you that elusive score 5.0 on vista, linux would run so fast it would be faster then the speed of light, catch up with itself so that if you ever decided to shut it down it would actually be shut down before you had it booted up, destroying the entire universe in the process and just try claiming that on your home insurance.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How about, you know, just putting it in a different room from you?
Gamers -- too much money, not enough real problems. Well, 0bama will fix that!
Compare that to building the thing yourself, with the exact same components: probably under 1/3rd the cost.
At that price, he could almost justify a Mac Pro! (But seriously: a similar Mac Pro could likely be configured for less!)
Oh, and seriously: at $16k, I'd expect the system to be small, fanless, and near-hermetic. And, I'd like to see how "quiet" that system is in 12 months once the fans start to take a little wear.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Rereading my initial comment I note that I did specify a failover server. Perhaps you did NOT read the first paragraph of my top level comment and thus your post is total bullshit. For the last sentence of the first paragraph says thusly:
It's a minor detail anyway.
The new Mac Mini
Windows Server 2008 - $8,500.
Foreplay?
XML causes global warming.
Well to be honest if they had contracted Porsche to design it at least in 5 years it would still be worth 80% of its price on the marketplace (if this is justified or not is not the point, the point is that Porsche have an abnormaly high resell value on the marketplace. It's a fact that I fully know about for I own one ;)
Mammography
True geek would not only look at but INTO breasts too!
I just put together a little beastie for about $2000 (14000 less). Instead of 4 quad core opterons, I have 1 quad core i7-920 on an Asus P6T deluxe-oc, 12GB of DDR3 ram, 2xSeagate 500GB sata drives, and a Happaugge 1800 tv tuner all running Linux/Ubuntu 8.10 with kernel 2.6.29-rc8. I'm using an Enermax Infinity 720w supply in a cooler master cosmos case with a thermalrite ultra extreme 120 (T.R.U.E.-120) keeping the cpu to 30C at idle and 59C under very heavy load. Its all on air (although the case has all the provisions for liquid chillers).
Except MacPro has Nehalem Xeons which no one else has yet. A lot of people miss this little detail. :-)
Also after a disk failure, there is significant correlation of a second failure (failures are not independent - some risk analyses presume they are): Usenix: Disk failures in the real world.
Also I wouldn't ignore anecdotes that the rebuild process thrashes disks hard and can cause a second failure (or that the rebuild can take longer than you thought).
Happy moony
Ass. That's what this $16k systems looks like. Ass.
what economic crisis?
I made a similar box back in November . . .
http://didthisreallywork.blogspot.com/
Cheaper and without h2o cooling. Runs perfectly.
I think it cost 11K. sheesh I should sell these things . . .
Most people who order these are just trying to create the "Ultimate PC!" to put inside their amazing new case mod.
A key indicator is that they have to get top of the line on everything.
If you were using it for work, you would gear it more towards what you are actually trying to do.
Most people who aren't involved in sound engineering or multimedia have no use for an overpriced soundcard and get by with the standard (which is still pretty decent), for example.