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Building an 1100Mhz "SuperStation"
Anonymous Coward writes "There is an interesting article on building a dual Celeron 550 (overclocked 366) computer by David Green; he goes a bit into the theory of SMP computers, what components he chose, and shows some benchmark results (under Linux) for the system. His computer could really crank through RC5 blocks..." Us hardware tinkerers love this sort of stuff; the rest of you can feel free to ignore it. (AboutLinux.com is where this cool scoop came from, BTW.)
Welcome to Roblimo land.
Ya his shit is pretty old a lot of the time. Like the Kryotech article that came out recently on the Athlon which has been out there for two months aleady.
From what I understand, the celerons and the PIIIs are moving towards a socket config. Probably not the same socket (that would be too simple). The Athlons are moving that way as well. I don't even think the newest celerons are available as slot1. I'd rather have socket370 then slot1.
Exactly. I'm running Linux on this here 486, IPMasqing for 3 other computers to my cable modem and serving POP3, Sendmail and Apache. Normal load average? 0.06 or so.
What is an RC5 key? What's it for? What's it do? Good or Bad? Any other info you can give to help out a newbie would be greatly apreciated.
SopWATh
Certainly some applications are embarrasingly parallel (aka "data parallel"); that is, after a tiny bit of startup cost, your speedup is only limited by the number of processors and the size of the problem (amount of data).
Examples of data parallel problems: image rendering, key cracking, matrix-matrix and matrix-vector multiplication.
However, many applications are not embarrasingly parallel; that is, the processors must communicate (aka synchronize) at certain points, in order for the computation to proceed. Here, your speedup is limited by the
Examples: sorting, matrix factorization (e.g. LU decomposition).
In my experience, commodity Intel motherboards scale very poorly for this latter class of problems. Why? If the two threads always hit their L2 cache (i.e. don't have to fetch across the memory bus to main memory), then everything might be ok. (even then, write sharing can cause cache thrashing!). If the threads must fetch miss L2 cache often enough, then (on commodity motherboards), the threads will be serialized, because the memory is not interleaved, nor multi-ported.
On fancier (expensiver, hehe) SMPs, processors are connected to either interleaved, multi-ported memory, or over a crossbar (rather than a bus), or probably all three. For example, the HP Convex Exemplar ($$$) has all three.
On a counting (integer) sort, a 2-processor commodity SMP is limited to 1.4/2 speedup (roughly the fraction of memory references which hit cache). The convex gets speedups of 1.95 (limited only by the tiny startup costs, as in the embarrasingly parallel case).
The GTL+ bus (used for SMP on pentium pro/2/3 systems) is a shared bus. EVERY processor shares the same 100MHz bus to the system. It is IMPOSSIBLE for 2 550 celerons to consistently perform up to par as a true 1100Mhz celeron. That one POV RAY bench you did was a fluke. Lets see you repeat the speed increase in ANY other program. I doubt if you even get 140% the speed of a 375MHz celeron.
no
The problem with Celeron CPUs, is that they were not meant to be used in an SMP machine. They don't scale well. Better off with a PIII.
Sure, for times when money isn't a main factor, like when buying a server for business use. But for the home user a dual P3 550+ might be out of reach in terms of cost. An Abit BP6 with 2 Celerons is a relatively cheap solution which provides the home user with an awful lot of power.
It may not be quite as stable as a Slot-1 dual board, but that's more an issue for professional users. The BP6/Celeron combo is aimed at overclockers, who are generally more concerned about bang for the buck.
what is this?
i want to know wtf "Xwindows" is. must be some new term invented by the linux newbies.
AS FRED SANFORD ONCE SAID: "YOU DUMMY".
take an intro course to parallel algorithms or a basic computer engineering course.
heck, do they even teach this stuff anymore?
I gave up the sig's years ago. Gave me lung cancer.
Did you mean 'hacker' or 'cracker'?
Do you know the diffrence? I don't think you do.
I have a dual celeron system, currently running at 504mhz. Under Linux, I couldnt be happier with the speed of things. Celerons, believe it or not, can be used very efficiently in a server, regardless of the fact they only have 128kb L1 cache.
I'm running the same thing almost:
96 meg: (64 PC100 32 crap)
So this prevents me from going over 92Mhz or so.
I haven't had to touch the voltage settings etc.
I run 2x 366 @ (5.5x and 92 Mhz).
This gives me 505.981381 MHZ and bogomips : 504.63.
Works great for RC5 stuff, but honestly besides that I haven't seen much improvement over my old PII-233.
But hell........ Having a GHz computer just sounds cool when you tell someone.... And cheap. cheap cheap. Recommend to anyone.
PS If you do get one download the bios update from http://www.bp6.com
it continues to amaze me how people think you can slap two processors in a box and have a '2xclock speed' computer.
this demonstrates a complete lack of basic knowledge of what multiprocessing is and is not.
Then I must be working on my 25.6Ghz machine (64 x 400Mhz) Sun E10000. At least I have the bandwidth (>10GB/sec) to eat up the CPU's clock cycle.
there was a discussion on slashdot when the abit bp6 first came out. .... And it convinced me to buy one of those babys... :) I have my two 366s overclocked to 550, too. But I just bought the (quote): "Intel Celeron Processor / Designed for the Basic PC" and used the fan that came with it. Works fine. No Problems so far. jp
Just curious - a Celeron 366 overclockable to 550 costs $110; an AMD K6-2/450 is $55 - and I think it has a larger L1 and L2 cache, so the performance might be similar. Are there any particular reasons for avoiding AMD for SMP applications?
after looking at your homepage, its apparent how much of a lamer you really are.
read the "parallelism for dummies" book before you make such STUPID claims in the future.
2xnMhz processors != 2nMhz processor
I'd be weary of buying anything from TigerDriect.
diff -urN old/ new/
Teehee, I noticed that I submitted that post a little early. Let me finish the unfinished sentence in third paragraph:
... with communication-bound algorithms] your speedup is limited by Amdahl's Law. As most good laws, it's pretty simple to state: the best parallel efficiency you can expect is bounded by the amount of time spent doing serial stuff.
So, with an embarrasingly parallel algorithm, you're set! But, an algorithm which has lots of communication is doomed on two fronts: first, Amdahl's Law hits it due to the amount of communication (time spent doing zero computation!), and second, commodity SMPs, get a further hit due to poor memory hierarchy design: once the algorithm strays beyond L2 cache, the application is serialized.
nick
I used a AMD 486dx4/120Mhz registering a mere 60 bogomips with two tulip ethernet cards tossing packets around for nearly 6 months. The machine ran flawlessly with 40mb EDO ram, and had consistant uptimes of months (upgrades, and misc).
Now I've upgraded to a AMD K6-233Mhz with 128mb EDO, and have been using it as a workstation, hosting dynamic websites on cable. redirecting quake servers inside the LAN and other neat stuff. I just got a dual celeron 366 setup, and will be playing with it.
Migrating my existing system to it, can't wait to play in 1k bogomips. Should be interesting.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds -Albert Einstein
Worse than a lack of knowledge of multiprocessing, it represents the very sloppy use of (lack of understanding of?) units. MHz tells you how many times a second something happens. If you've got one soundcard sampling at 44.1 MHz, and you slap a second one in, and start advertising that you can do sampling at 88.2 MHz--you're wrong! You can now record twice as many 44.1 MHz audio streams, but you can't record at twice the sampling rate.
/proc/cpuinfo. Do you see one CPU 2Xspeed or two CPUs at the 1X speed? (I know you can just edit the source... So does _everything_ on the box see a single processor at 2X or two processors? This is where the SMP knowledge comes in again.)
You could slave the two soundcards together under a master sync, write the code to make it look like a single sound card, and have a single input... (but this gets into the poster's comment about lack of SMP understanding).
To finish this analogy: take one of your dual Celeron boxes, cat
I've got an SMP box which really rocks compared to a single processor box of 2X the speed--it does mail/web/services ~5 users simultaneously (not just "pine"-users either.. matlab, gimp, netscape, emacs type-users. So my experience is that SMP boxes are great for many processes (unless you want to run just one thing like rc5--and then it is still running processes for each processor! compare this w/ the soundcard analogy above.)
That Little Green Heat Sink (LGHS) of the BP6 may
:)
need some special treatment if you want to oc your
BP6 baby:
The LGHS is casted out of Aluminum. The side which
makes contact with the BX chips is not flattenened
mechanically after casting (bean counters?).
Problem:
When the LGHS cools down after casting,
it will bend upwards because of its shape
(look at its bridge like design). Now the
contact surface will make very bad contact with
your BX chip.
The original (bended) heatsink may produce hot
spots on your BX chip. Even an additional fan
cannot help, if the heat sink makes poor contact.
______|---------|______
|-------------------|
LGHS hot after casting
_______/--------\_______
|----______________----|
LGHS cooled down after casting
Solution:
Pull the two white plugs which are pressing the
LGHS against the chip and remove the LGHS.
Take fine water resistant sanding paper (120 is
OK), apply some water for smoothest results and
put paper on a flat piece of glass. Now flatten
the LGHS contact surface.
Control result by holding a ruler against the
surface and look against light. If surface is
flat, you'll see a nice constant boundary.
Use heat transfer compound when reassembling.
This may make the difference between a stable and
an unstable board. Same thing applies for the CPU
heat sinks.
Now reboot into BIOS and set fsb at will
--
I have a dual 400 system setup, but I am not overclocking it... It seems that I have enough problems as it is... Every four days it crashes. Just locks up tight on whatever it is doing and halts. No idea why, it just does.
It is fast, but it pisses me off... What can you do eh?
Could the crashes be due to overheating in the BX chipset as mentioned in the article?
:)
I ran 4 SETI processes on my machine for 4 weeks, and it raised the CPU temp about 4-5 degrees F. At the same time I did my normal everyday stuff, and I had no problems what-so-ever.
I haven't really tested out sustained max I/O throughput, but I hadn't thought about the chipset being a possible point of failure from overheating.
What would be a good test for max sustained I/O on Linux? I would like to see if I could kill the machine.
Also, has anyone tested the kernel patch to make the HPT66 (UDMA/66) chip work on the BP6?
Thanks,
PS:No its not 1100MHz, but 1101 BogoMIPs still looks cool when it starts!
(and yes.. I know its a useless number for comparisons)
Some further speed improvement may be reached
by running jobs on dedicated CPUs (clean cache).
This can be done by installing pset utility.
Check your voltages and temperatures under Linux
using lm_sensors. BTW If your Vcore2 stays constant
around 1.5V: There are BP6 boards which have
switched Vcore2 and Vbatt readings.
I've got an overclocked celeron 366 SMP machine, so do 2 of my friends.. is this really rare?
:)
Maybe it's cause were Canadian, eh?
Michael Dikkema Systems Administration Moot Technologies
I assume the avg slashdot reader is smart enough to know when you say you have a GHz dual Celeron System. Then you have two CPU's at 500MHz.. end of story. Maybe not though.
I find this issue to be overblown in my completely untested opinion. I've been running a 400 at 83mhz FSB with a 1:1 AGP:PCI ratio for some time now, with no problems, and I know quite a few people who are at 83 or 75 mhz FSB with no problems either. Where you start to run into problems is with older hardware, like my Future Domain SCSI card from `94, AKA the AHA-2920A, which simply refuses to work. Put it this way: anyone who needs to actually worry about FSB incompatibly problems obviously knows their stuff, and is more than likely going to be building their own system with cutting-edge parts that won't have FSB issues. For most of us it's not going to matter.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
. If you've got one soundcard sampling at 44.1 MHz
A soundcard sampling at 44.1 megahertz?? We're talking ultrasound scans here... Dude, next time you complain about someones unit usage, try to check your own...
/. really, REALLY needs to start giving moderator access to people with *working brains*.
- A.P. (Score -1 Flamebait, if you want. I just hope I knocked some *sense* into some idiot moderators.)
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Just my 2 cents, see what you do with it... My system: Chaintech 6BTM mainboard, Matrox Marvel G200, 128MB mem, WD 10.something GB harddisk. Celeron466 Proc. (7*66MHz).. The Chaintech board can be tweaked to run at 66, 68,75 or 88 MHz. (or forced to 100MHz bus and then even more tweaked to 100+MHz... But for Celerons this is nice to try for a few seconds, see that the CPU won't hold up and then abandon this). Currently I have my board running at 75MHz. Which means the CPU does a cool 525MHz, the AGP bus runs at 75MHz, with which the Matrox card doesn't seem to have a problem with. Neither do any of the PCI cards. (SCSI controller for my CD ROM and CD Writer, soundcad and network card) It has been running 24/7 now for two weeks without a problem. And that's even with doing some video-grabbing.
:-)
I did try to crank the bus up to 88MHz, but during the POST, after seeing the CPU the system halts... Since there are no components I can ditch, I didn't bother to find out what exactly caused the halt in the POST.
Running the board at 100MHz bus (which would mean the proc would be running at 7*100MHz) the board didn't even see the CPU. Not even at a real "cold" start. (room temperature system, not turned on for at least an hour)
But anyway... I wish I'd bought the ABit dual Celeron board now... That would have given me a 2*525MHz machine.... (if that board supports the 75MHz bus-freq...)
Why am I telling this... Hell, I don't know.. It's late and I'm babbling...
----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
Just thought I'd mention how happy I am with my Dual PII 400 machine. I started with a single processor but added the second about three weeks ago. I would like to comment on how much simplier it is to "Add" SMP to LINUX as compared to NT. With NT you have to either buy the resource kit, or reinstall. With Slackware, just checked the SMP box after a make xconfig, recompiled and I was good to go. My benchmarking was with rc5des. I now get around 2.25 Mkeys/sec under Linux, about the same under NT.
Here's my computer specs:
SuperMicro P6DBU motherboard (Ultra2 SCSI, mmmm)
PII 400 x 2
128MB Generic PC100 RAM
Matrox Marvel G200 Video
SB AWE64 Gold
*grmbl* Since this was about RC5... Forgot to mention the macine does an average of 1,445 MKeys/s
Yes.. I know... I shouldn't be posting this late and in thise state.. Yada Yada Nag Nag Whine Whine Shit happens......
----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
Then there's the celeron Beowulf clusters (e.g. Anandtec's 24 celeron "warpcore" cluster). So I suspect the Celeron is relatively scalable :)
Regarding an early comment about whether or not there will be any SMP chipsets for the K7. I've been waiting for a response from VIA on this. However, they usually take 1-3 weeks to respond to e-mail, in much the same way Dinosaurs were rumored to respond to pain (read: veeeerrrryyyyy sllloooooowwwwwlllyy)
As I write this from a box with a 18GB Western Digital Expert 7200RPM UDMA 66 hard drive running Linux, nope - that isn't true. In fact, he mentions the existence of a patch. Several ways to run the drive - as a regular old ATA, as a UDMA 33, or a UDMA 66. The patch exist for the 2.2 kernel series. I'm running 2.3.13 - which doesn't need to be patched. In the "for what it's worth" category:
[root@eco jgreer]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hde
/dev/hde:
JimTiming buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.25 seconds =102.40 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.73 seconds =17.16 MB/sec
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy.... ad naseum.
clock speed is not a measure of 'CPU cycles per second going on under the hood'.
my god, have most of you losers even gotten out of high school yet?
"The Great Chunder Page - Alcohol Induced Fun!"
oh, we are now so overwhelmed by your intelligence as evidenced by this comment.
Okay, the package for Linux that is capable of reading sensors on various motherboards (dunno about the abit, but it works on mine) is lm_sensors and is available at "http://www.netroedge.com/~lm78". It consists of kernel modules, a client program or two, and a C library for building apps that read the sensors. Good luck.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
he gets paid though, doesn't he? and i've never had a problem with anything on slashdot, and most people haven't, i think slashdot's pretty good, adn unfortunately i'm addicted to it, as i'm addicted to checking my sparse email.
Odd, I thought the BP6 with the BX chip set could handle 100Mhz FSB without a problem? 100 Mhz FSB is now standard for the latest PIIs and all the PIIIs.
At least in theory, dual CPUs should help quite a bit in X. The client sends requests to the server, which then does the drawing. With a dual box, they both get their own CPU to work on, meaning the client can prepare the next request while the server is drawing the last one.
In the X FAQ, one of the suggestions for speeding X up is to "swap" machines with a coworker, and use his machine set to your display, and vice versa. The point of this exercise is to reduce the constant context switches (1 per X request). Of course, with extensions like MIT-SHM this is (obviously) no longer a win, however on a SMP box, it very well could be.
Mhz==Clockspeed. Period. Nothing about ops per second in there, at all.
mhz!=ops per second, by a long shot...
Man hours is a concept of throughput, not speed.
Mhz is a concept of speed, not throughput.
If you want to measure clock speed, you use Mhz..
If you want to measure throughput, you use mips, mflops, or other such unit.
Yes, there is a big difference, and my original analogy holds.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Mhz==speed, specifically in this case, cpu clock speed.
mips/mflops/etc==throughput, in this case, dual processor throughput.
He should have given us the bogomips score if anything, though it is a completely inaccurate way of testing throughput, at least he would have had his units right...
(yes, I know he did give us the bogomips score later, but the tilte was still a major screw up..)
And yes, I do have a sense of humor (somewhere around here... D'oh, where did I put it again?)
and could figure out what he meant, even if it was completely wrong...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Well, if you're more intelligent than I and mature enough to be out of high school then perhaps you'd care to educate rather than denigrate?
I still think the article was pretty clear and informative in it's claims and never mentioned a clock speed (bus speed*clock multiplier) above 550MHz. I suppose you can interpret the 1100MHz figure however you please. I chose to interpret it in a way that made sense. If you choose to interpret it another way then perhaps you should consider how it was intended before slagging the writer of the article off as an idiot.
The Great Chunder Page - Alcohol Induced Fun!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I believe supercomputer status is based on number of operations executed per second, not the number of processors.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
MHz != Clockspeed, MHz == 10*6 cycles per second. I never mentioned operations once.
The Great Chunder Page - Alcohol Induced Fun!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
About the hardware buying cycle ... I have experienced the same thing. While a 550 x 2 SMP Celeron machine certainly looks cool on paper - why in the WORLD does anyone need that? Ever since I cut back on my game playing (I regulate myself to basically emulated consoles now.. I find they're the most fun) and in the past year I've migrated from Windows to Linux as my desktop of choice, the hardware rat race doesn't amuse me anymore.
... they'd much rather shell out $700 for the latest 900MHZ WunderProcessor CPU and a board that supports it and plop it in their system,rather than taking their current perfectly usable system and say.. implementing SCSI in it which would probably make a bigger performance boost.
I've been trying to explain as of late to people
they put entirely too much emphasis on the clock speed of the CPU. I explain how the real bandwith in a system is the hard drive and video card usually. But no one listens
I know this will sound cheesy - but using Linux has given me more respect for technology. Before I'd think "oh gosh, that 486 sucks. It can't do anything!". Now and days, I see a 386 40mhz with a cd-rom and think "what a perfectly usable little linux box that could be!".
Stop software manufacturer & CPU makers siphoning of your wallets - use Linux. The little OS that could.
It is 1100Mhz. All that means is that you have 1100M cpu cycles a second which is undeniably true as far as I can see.
I didn't see anyone claiming that it was equivalent to a single chip running at 1100Mhz, in fact if you actually read the article the guy explains what SMP is useful for and what limitations it has in his "Theory" section on the first and second page.
Slashdot should implement a system which gives people -1 on a comment unless they've actually visited the article being discussed (logged by having an internal link which redirects to the target article). There are clearly far too many people commenting on something they haven't read (often in an attempt be first post?).
The Great Chunder Page - Alcohol Induced Fun!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Can you tell what number of RC5 blocks you completed at the different clocking rates every day?
diff -uNr new/ orig/ send patches to linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu (make sure you either subscribe to the list ahead of time or have read through some of the archives, so you know what is what.)
It continues to amaze me that people insist on commenting on articles they clearly haven't read.
This demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge on how to avoid making yourself look like a total fool.
The article is very clear on what an SMP system does and does not do. If you'd read it you'd know that.
The 1100Mhz figure is correct, it is simply a measure of the number of CPU cycles per second going on under the hood. It is not a measure of overall speed, nor did anyone say it was.
Some of the 'experts' on Slashdot are clearly so 'knowledgable' that they don't need to read an article to comment on it. Slashdot should do something about this (see my post above).
The Great Chunder Page - Alcohol Induced Fun!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
search for 'lm_sensors` (Linux)
Some people claim the Celeron doesn't scale well and to some degree they are right. The Celeron's second level cache, though twice as fast, is only one fourth the size of that of a Pentium III and as such main memory will have to be accessed more frequently. If you don't happen to be overclocking, that main memory runs at only 66 Mhz , compared to 100 Mhz on other Intel processors. Add another Celeron on the same bus and at some point you're going to have contention as both CPUs wait around for their memory accesses.
This isn't always a critical issue. One program that's hardly affected is the RC5DES client. This program is optimised for i686 processors and it supports SMP. The client will automatically recognise and use 2 CPUs and a second CPU gives instant practically double key throughput. My own dual Celeron 366 running at 550 Mhz goes from 1.6 to 3.15 Mkeys a sec. It seems that RC5 is a small piece of code with a small data set that runs almost completely in the L1 and L2 caches. The dual Celeron scores competitively with even a Xeon 550.
Now enter the SETI client. I was trying the text mode NT client and noticed it was running much slower than I had expected on my box, so I retimed the same work unit (WU) a couple of times with different configurations. The same PC, which was equipped with only 64 MB of memory - fine for RC5DES, does the WU in about 10 hours and 30 minutes. However, when I ran a second parallel SETI client (The client is generic i386 and does not support SMP by itself) it did two WUs in about 15:50 hours. Major overhead!
It didn't matter much whether I let the two processes run free or explicitly tied their affinity to one CPU each. In the first case one of the processes was finished about 3 minutes earlier, but total time was still roughly the same.
So I first added another 64 MB and retimed it. Timing went down to 14 hours and 40 mins. Although I hadn't noticed it swapping and the SETI docs claim the clients take only about 13 megs of mem each, the original 64 MB apparantly was not quite enough to fit both processes completely in real memory, and thus the modest improvement. Then I tried changing the memory timing from CAS 3 to CAS 2 and lo and behold, I was now doing this unit (same unit twice in parallel) in only 12:30 hours each! Nice. Much closer to the 10:30 of a single 550.
But still not quite as good as dual Pentium IIIs, as far as I can gather from Usenet postings that is. Xeons supposedly have phenomenal SETI scores. And because I overclock, my Celeron runs at a 100 Mhz bus, partly making up for the difference. Normal Celerons running at 66 Mhz bus would break down worse, as far as I can predict.
I've noticed some people here are quite critical about these dual Celeron freaks. But in some ways our bragging rights are real and these PCs really do counts as 1100 Mhz. In others, it falls down flat on its face. I love my box tho. I learned a lot of stuff about how different operating systems upgrade to SMP, how process affinity works out, which drivers aren't threadsafe, all stuff I can apply when I'm working on serious SMP hardware. Yeah it mostly sits around cracking keys or SETI, but just the ability to run VMWare on a CPU of its own is at least one killer app.
Michiel
I have been running dual 600's celeries o/c'd for over a year now. This is definately old news.
And NO you do not get 2+CPU Speed when you stack them. All BOGOMIPS means is that this is the relative timing delay loop run against the processor then added together. Linus said this was a joke a very long time ago. I keep hearing "Show me the source" well why don't you fscking read it sometime?!?!?
Is it me or does slashdot seem to be running the same stories every quarter?
Too bad it is totally personalized by the owners.
I thought this was news for nerds...stuff that matters.
Ok.. first off, I still am running my dual 450 slot 1 celeron box.. (899 or some such bogomips FWIW, more if I bump em up to 464..) yes, I was one of the old school, hard core, drill the via's and solder the wires on the CPU guys!
If I remember my kernel compile benchmarks, I would get 60-70% increase over a single processor, the dual compile time was about 1 min 35 sec for the 2.0.36 kernel. Never got around to trying it on (and under) a 2.2... SMP's improved, the code got bigger. Maybe I'll get an 2.0.36 source and compile it on the current Mandrake 6.1 system...
I wanted to comment on the Beowulf comment.. I'd heard of one, at a small college in Florida (that I can't remember now) that built one on 300a's running at 450Mhz and it tied a Cray for the #1 spot in the POV Raytracing benchmark.. (don't have the site handy, but that would be where to find it) And of course, the price/performance point is probably a record unto itself. Cheap?? When I bought my 300a's back a year ago Sep, they were cheap at $160!! (compared with PII-450's at $750!) You can get 366's for $50 bucks now...
So, they work, they work well, yes I wouldn't bet the (server) farm on them for mission critical stuff, but for cheap home or research work, there ya go..
Heh. (for the sarcasm-impaired)
heh.
:)
:P
:)
we do primary DNS and mail relay for about hrm.. 400 simultaneous clients on a p200mmx linux box
ah well
our proxy server for the same clients is a p2-300 with 320meg ram.
it also does secondary DNS, and sits on a load of about 0.10 pretty constantly
smash
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Is it really a good idea cracking keys and looking for et's on an overclocked box? I remember reading an article(a how-to? I don't recall) where the author did a couple of fractals and could find a few tiny miscalcs. I can just see it now...
:-) . Keep looking...
;), I humbly admit to greatly simplifying the above two programs' operations... but you get the point.
,well, its very rare etc." Now that everyone's into number-crunching, who's to say it's not happening now?
*number crunching noises from happy o/c'd cpu's*
setiathome scans: Greetingd earkhoslkings ! takiwe me to ykhour leahjhgyder!
Nah, just static
rc5 decrypts : The secret massage us :
Nope, that aint the key *sigh* keep searching..
The above examples are just that
I can't speak from any overclocking experience myself, frickin' MII's are a little unstable at their rated speed anyway... and whose to say intel aren't that good with their overclocking? Remember the fdiv bug? Intel : "Ohyeh
Just a few stray thoughts...
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
If the original serial algorithm takes kn log(n) units of time, then the parallel step takes roughly half that, since
k(n/2) log(n/2) = k(n/2) (log(n)-log(2)) ~ kn log(n)/2,
and the final merge takes time proportional to n, which is small compared to kn log(n)/2 (insignificant, for large n).
So the total time taken is roughly half the original time.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
The problem with Celeron CPUs, is that they were not meant to be used in an SMP machine. They don't scale well. Better off with a PIII.
I know a guy who's already done this and has a functioning 1100mhz system although running win2k sadly. He also has one of those neeto cryotech chilled cases.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Does anyone have experience with the Pine Technology dual slot one from Tigerdirect.com stock number P450-4000? It also lists the usual overpriced P2 and P3 suspects. I know, I know, double processor does not mean double speed. I just want to run some old DOS and Win apps with VMware. I'd run them directly, but DOS doesn't run on the new hardware (surprise!). Will VMWare put my Linux stuff on one processor, and VMWare and the crud it's running on the other? I'm already using VM like this, but it crawls on my Celery 366.
I tried 466s at 588 and a 366s at 550 for several months. The bus speed makes a huge difference.
The 466s encoded MPEG video and tested RC5 keys faster than anything but compiling was dog slow.
The 366s are slower at MPEG encoding and RC5 than the 466s but compiling is light speed faster. You need to get those 366s pretested from a company which has been testing them for a while. My untested pair of 366s was stable running RC5, Seti, and Prime95 for days on end but attempting to composite video at 550Mhz crashed them every time.
I got a tested pair of 366s and these are stable compositing video. While they run Prime95 at 574Mhz the video compositing crashes them every time above 560Mhz, You need a really small heat sink to fit in the BP6. My dual 550 uses Radio Shack blowers on the default heat sinks and stays at 104F.
Is it me or do most of these people seem to buy dual celerons just to get higher seti scores? This seems like such a waste of time and money to me.
Joe
Slashdot's new slogan: news for nerdy wannabees. Stuff that's simple.
Unfortunately, the Celeron 366 haven't been available for a few months now, save for the few companies that have been hoarding them (and selling tested 366@550 at a premium price).
The Celeron has a fixed multiplier, so the only way to overclock is to increase the multiplier. 400@600 is not unheard of, but it's also not too common. While it's possible to use a bus speed in between 66 and 100, it's not desired because you'll have to overclock (or underclock) your PCI & AGP bus. That's a Good Thing in theory, but a Bad Thing in reality, because there are a good number of add on cards and hard drives that won't take a higher bus.
If I were to build an overclocked Celeron system today, I'd buy a single pretested 366@550.
going on what i would like to know is wether there is any s/w that will pick up the cpu temp +fan speed etc readings from the ABIT motherboards and display them while you are running your os and apps, maybe you will need support from the kernel. But has something like this been done or is it even possible?
it had be really nice if you could have s/w monitoring all those readings and turn the computer off or send out admin alerts if the readings reach a user defined critical point.
sorta like a UPS.
Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second F for this term. - Prof. A.S. Tanenbaum, author of Minix,
Yes I have one just like this,
2 x 366 Celerons @ 550 (Week 30 CPUs). Booting reports 1101 BogoMips.
128 PC100 (-6) Megabytes of RAM.
Diamond Viper V770 32 Megs VideoCard.
Soundblaster Live Soundcard.
Philips 107S, 17" monitor.
Putting this system together was almost too simple and costed about 13-1400$ (9000 French Francs).
If anybody is assembling a new system today, I wouldn't hesitade to reccomend this solutilon, the machine absolutely rocks !
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
So I guess I'm typing on a 1150 Mhz machine ! Athlon 550 Mhz 2xVoodoo2 SLI 100 Mhz (with 3 chips on each!)
I have to agree that Mhz is directly related to a processor, and there for it is simply better to have titled it "building a dual 550Mhz system", or "building a dual system almost equal to 1100Mhz" (but that would have been rediculously long title).
The one thing you are mistaken on is that at some point in the past (and even now a days) some processors did not have a 1 to 1 ratio of cycles per clock, even pic processors today running at 20mhz is only doing 5 million clocks a second.
But I think the word "cycle" is self explaining and that your simily is more accurate, like saying the child on a bicycle is going twice as many cycles as the guy on a one wheeled bike, when they are both cycling at the same speed, the RPM of a car is it 2 times more then an RPM of a motorcycle just because the car has 2 more wheels rotating then the motorcycle? Of course not. (Notice this has nothing to do with how much work 2 people can do versus how much work a single person can do, simply because Mhz is not measuring operations a second as you said). 2 cycles happening simultaniously is still 2 cycles happening simultaniously but is not 2 cycles, if you take half a cycle from one CPU and half a cycle from another does that make a complete cycle? No, because they are independant. I think this abuse of "MegaHertz" is nothing but garbage, and not to diffrent from the abuse the hard drive industry did to "MegaByte", to fool the ignorant, in this case it was used to get the article a lot of attention (the ignorant are less likely to know what SMP is).
I decided to use the "slotket" approach: a small adaptor board that allows a Socket-370 Celeron to be used in standard Slot-1 motherboards. My assembly & test notes are online here.
By using the slotket, I am able to "upgrade" to a non-overclocked PentiumIII (or maybe Coppermine) when those CPUs become cheap enough. Until then, the dual-300A processors overclocked to 450 really cook!
Therefore, I'd have to say that there's no reason for a normal Linux box to have dual processors. Come to think of it, my P-120s run WindowMaker pretty quickly.. maybe one of those is all most of us need.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
just kidding...
J.
- The guy used 128MB of RAM.. IMHO, dual CPU system deserves 256 at least. Yes, I know about prices. Sad.
;-) ;-) how to make proper diffs, where to send them and what to do next? Some pointers to good places with hardware specs are also welcome.
- "18GB Western Digital Expert 7200rpm UDMA 66 hard drive (Linux only supports UDMA33!)"
Oh dear.. It goes on and on - linux doesn't support these, linux doesn't support that, does it bad, does that even worse.. Probably revolution need some more people. Me for once
Can someone tell (in 25 words or less
A quite timely article I must say since I recently started to seriously think about putting together a Dual Celeron machine myself. :)
:(
However, I don't think I'll overclock it, I imagine I wouldn't be able to stand the noise from all those fans...
Ok, so a SGI Origin 2000 with 256 450 CPU's is a 115.2 GHz computer? give me a break.
I have mine running dual 400MHz celerons @ 500mhz, rock solid. 600MHz boots but it does freeze within minutes. Dual peltier fans keep the CPUs nice and cool, while the sides of the case are kept off for improved circulation..
Definitely pick up the BP6.. for its subversive element if for anything else.
Bunch of whiners. Before spouting off why don't you try it? I have a dual 333 overclocked to 750 Mhz (yes, that's 375 + 375). It does the standard POVBench in 1'30". When I split the work into 2 equal loads (~1/2 half of the picture), run them simultaneously, and splice the picture into a whole, it takes exactly 45". That's right math geniuses, exactly twice as fast! Obviously there is no resource contention.
Linux SMP makes for a profoundly faster system - more responsive and multitasking than single cpu. I highly recommend it to all linux users, especially when it can be done so cheaply.
tcboo
I have a question about something that I read in this article
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5.Consider upgrading to kernel 2.2.13 or above. I upgraded to this kernel after writing the article and it seems to eliminate some Xwindows programs hanging up.
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What is this? I thought the highest stable (2.2.x) series kernel was 2.2.12. (At least the last time I checked kernelnotes.org)