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US Army Needs Linux Workstation Advice
Shawn wrote in asking for suggestions on high-end Linux Workstation configurations for the US Army. Aparently, they are looking at replacing some SGIs with cheaper PCs, and this being Slashdot, I'm sure some of you might be able to make some improvements to their suggested configuration. I can't tell you how glad I am to see the US Army giving Linux a chance. The US Navy could probably learn a thing or two from this. Click below for the full text.
Shawn asks: "The US Army is looking for advice on purchasing several high-end Linux workstations. These systems will be used in a post-flight processing environment. We routinely process raw data measurements in excess of 1 million samples/second. This processing can utilize several GB of disk space and up to and exceeding 1GB of RAM. We are currently using SGI Octane systems but need to switch to the lower cost PC environment. This will allow less costly while still providing excellent performance. Let us know any advice you may have or insights we may not have thought of.
Here are the specifications we are currently considering:
Motherboard
- Intel® 840 chipset
- RIMM slots for at least 1GB dual-channel Rambus® memory
- Integrated dual ATA-66 EIDE controllers
- Ports: USB (2), serial (2), Parallel, PS/2
- Integrated Ultra 160/M SCSI and Ultra/Wide SCSI Controllers
- NO INTEGRATED VIDEO
- Intel® Pentium® III 733Mhz (slot 1)
- .18-micron Coppermine architecture
- 256K cache
- 133MHz FSB
- 1GB Rambus® memory
- Full tower
- 300W or greater power supply
- 4 or more 5.25" exposed drive bays
- 1 or more 3.5" exposed drive bay(s)
- Two or more small fans blowing air directly across the drive bays
- 9GB Ultra 160/M SCSI (7200 rpm) hard drive (internal)
- 36GB (or larger) Ultra 160/M SCSI (10000 rpm) hard drive (internal)
- LS-120 internal superfloppy (IDE)
- 5X (or faster) DVD drive (internal - IDE or SCSI)
- Diamond Viper V770 Ultra 32 (AGP 2X/4X)
- Viewsonic P815 21" monitor
- 3Com 3C905B-TX ethernet card (PCI)
- SoundBlaster PCI128 (PCI)
- Powered speakers with wall adapter
- Soft-touch keyboard (no keyclick)
- Microsoft Intellimouse
- Red Hat Linux 6.x
- 3 year parts and labor
Thanks,
US Army Test Facility."
how long till the nsa shuts /. down for exposing national secrets? ;)
this is a joke just in case you have no sense of humor.
---
http://www.spiderinteractive.net
Actually, their business is to keep other people from killing me, or forcing me to do something I
don't want. Something that I heartily agree with.
Addtronics 6890a
And personally, I LOVE this sucker. Nice and open, even with tons of stuff in it, and it can take about 5 extra fans. Oh, and the Mo-Bo tray slides out with all the expansion cards in place with 4 screws removed.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
what happened to our all NT military?
jhartzell
I am really impressed at the configuration. However I was just wondering
1. Why not an SMP with Dual or Quad CPU when one is going to such lenghts ?
2. How about a TV Tuner cards... linux supports a lot of those now a days..... for those moments when working-on-a-high-end-pc becomes too boring.
3. Last not least, won't it be better to have a RAID of 3 or more instead of two simple disc drives ?
NEway... I'm not the one who is spending... so all I can do is give "FREE" suggessions here.
rkt
Their business is defense and deserves some
respect.
The actions of the US Army are decided by the US
Congress and the President of the US. Sure the
Pres. is a prick, but you can't blame the Army
for that.
Let's see if VA Linux can handle this.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
TROLLMASTAH needs to get a life.
for the DVD drive I'd take the Pioneer DVD-A04SZ, it's 10xDVD and 40xCD i like it oww and ya give us some more confidential information lol :) is Russia going to use any Atomic bombs soon ? ;)
Their business is killing people, something I don't agree with.
I can certainly understand. Would these computers be used to protect and serve? Depends on what side you happen to be on. Armies are controlled by a government, which is controlled by polititions, which is controlled by businesses, which are run by agressive suits, which are run by stockholders. Scary indeed.
But, if you wish to see high performance computing at its finest at the risk of selling your soul, this may be a fine opportunity. Enlist your skill today. The Army is looking for a Few Good Boxen.
I recently had a bad batch. (dropped packets)
A second source confirmed to me that these cards are troublesome.
I recommend anything with the Tulip chipset (DEC 2xx4x) e.g. Netgear
It's pretty clear. They are in the business of killing people.
They should stick to buying high-priced, high-end systems. Spend more on computers and less on bombs.
If you're really looking for speed, why not try a 64-bit processor? Alphas or Sparcs, both are very fast, especially Alphas. They run linux well, and are fairly stable. The only disadvantage is you would have to port the code by making sure that it's 64-bit clean.
what about a 264 or even a 164 alpha?
They don't need help with *Linux* per se, they need help with Redhat's Distribution of Linux. Offering help is interesting here when you think about it. Don't companies charge big bucks for this advice? Further, don't they make a living by providing this advice and support? Are we stealing business from our consulting brothers? ;-)
But seriously, while I'm a RedHat fan, I wonder if the request would have been more appropriate if they were looking for *general* Linux advice.
John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com Guru Interviews
How to Download YouTube Videos
Two thumbs down. SGI's are more expensive for a good reason. Why do you think these "cheap" PCs are so CHEAP? Come on US Army! We deserve the best! SGI all the way!
Some of those Sound Blaster 128's do not work because of randomly changing codec chips... I have an es1370 (also Creative,very similar to SB 128). The SB Live card has Creative's official blessing in the form of open source drivers from the manufacturer. Also, I like the DEC Tulip based cards; Bay and Linksys both make one. 3Com also charges 2x what their competitors charge due to name recognition. Otherwise, this system looks awesome.
Avoid the Intel CPU's. The AMD K7's outperform the Intel Pentiums, anyway.
Since this is a government bid, presumably security is a concern. The problem with the Pentiums is that the CPU microcode can be changed
on you, and you'd never know it.
This problem gets even worse with the Merced/Itanium/whatever-the-64-bit-chip is called.
With the embedded crypto, changeable microcode, and the moves to integrate ethernet on the motherboard, the 64-bit CPU will be wiretap ready.
This is presumably why the Chinese have moved away from the Pentiums, and Europe appears to be heading in the same direction.
The K7's don't have this problem. Nor do the PPC, or the DEC Alphas.
And now, with Linux, so can your hardware. Whatever it is.
Impressive system BTW. I wonder if my local Army Surplus store has any of these badboys for cheap.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Why the soundcard, speakers, DVD and LS-120?
Unless you are doing sound analysis, etc... Hmm.
It would be faster doing RAID (not sure of the level) for the drives, if you are doing alot of reading/writing.
Just my 2 cents.
-- The intelligence on this planet is a constant, but the population is growing. --
I thought this was a processor-intensive operation! What are you doing with a Microsoft Intellimouse on Linux? Why not use onboard video if all you're doing is anaylsis? Why the DVD? Do you want to watch movies during anaylsis? And why two USB ports?
Their mission is to protect your right to say what you just said. Their mission is to protect the American Idea, and the American way of life. Their mission is to sacrifice their own life for an idea that they believe is larger than they as individuals are. Their mission is something that is simply beyond your comprehension. You don't have to understand it, but you should respect it. And if killing is required, I don't have an issue with that. It's simply the way of the world.
jhartzell
Those are all fine components, but I think it's way too specific if you're not building it yourselves. Call your favorite Linux system vendor (VA? Dell? Penguin?) and say, "I'd like a bunch of kick-a** desktops for such-and-such sort of data analysis - what do you suggest?" Maybe procurement requirements won't let you do that, in which case I think they're broken (surprise, surprise).
ok, ok, i know, blatant apple plug, but have you thought about the G4? Other then ports and drives that you can add, it somewhat looks like that could do it for ya.Once they get LinuxPPC altivec optimized... *drool*.
Just dont forget about that Apples thinking that you can only run MacOS on it, you dont need x86 for everything you know =)
-confidential
I'm sure they'd love to land this account and someday maybe they'll even show a profit.
While I can't disrespect these boys who are eager to "play guns" for real, they do little worthy of respect.
Americans are hated all over the world, almost universally. Why? Because they've bomed more countries than anyone else since WWII, and because they've got soldiers on the soil of soveriegn nations. Your saying American soldiers are "just following orders." Now where have I heard that before?
I'd suggest either an Intel EtherExpress Pro or a card based on the DEC Tulip chipset instead of the 3c905 card... The Linux drivers for either of those seem to be better done (especially with SMP, though this is probably fixed now) than the 3com driver.
If you don't have any information to contribute to the individual who posed the question, the least you can do is refrain from posting your own warped projections on reality. I'd love to live in a world where a military isn't necessary, but we don't live in that world. Now if you want to pretend that we do live in that world, then go right ahead. But don't expect the rest of us to play along with your little fantasy.
(What sort of crack is the moderator that marked this post up smoking, BTW?)
Without an army any country could just walk in and take over. Lazy dumbass sheep like you probably wouldn't even know the difference with the new season of ER or some such crap. People have been killing each other since time began. Its part of nature. You can't change that. Now some famous quotes: "The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of "liberalism" they will adopt EVERY fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened. (Former Socialist Presidential Candidate) - Norman Thomas "Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth. - George Washington"
A nice setup, but here's a couple of suggestions: * Was that two processors you were considering? Perhaps push it to four. * Consider getting a redundant RAID array if this is going to hold terribly important data. * Make sure there's no chance of this system getting overheated. Don't spare the cooling fans. And get one of those temperature LCDs/warning alarms that mounts onto a 5.25" bay. * Redhat is great, but also consider SuSe 6.3, in Best Buy for about $25. Lots of great stuff on those CD ROMs.
Sometimes this kind of stuff just irks me - how clueless are people anyway??
This is a DATA PROCESSING machine. You do NOT need a 128bit sound card plus massive speakers. If any kind of sound is going to come out of this thing, an average SB16 or AWE32 is more than adequate.
You also do NOT need a Viper 770 video card. What the heck are you going to display on your screen that you would need 32 Mb of video RAM for?? Just an ordinary video will do - 8Mb at the most. This is X-Windows, not Quake.
No need to specify UltraDMA66 controllers if the only thing you're going to hang off it is a DVD drive.
The Athalons will still give you a few percent higher performance on math than the PIIIs, you may want to go with that instead - though you may not have much pick of motherboards.
Other than that, looks like a darn nice set of specs.
I recommend staying away from Adaptec.
Mylex is the best, Symbios has the lowest
price/performance ratio.
All hardware is troublesome under the right conditions. I've encountered some mean tulip cards also. My 3Com 905B is working great. No troubles at all.
Everything looks pretty tasty but currently the
driver for the TNT2 chipset doesn't perform very well.
The situation is being worked on.
Right now 3dfx chipsets have the best support but are pretty much maxed out potential wise.
I would suggest looking at Matrox G400 instead.
Matrox has been very good about releasing specs
and the current driver outperforms the TNT2 in terms of framerate by a considerable amount.
Apparently, everything you know about the U.S. Army was learned from video games.
That post really deserved a score: 2? What was so profound about it? BTW I don't think linux supports ultra 160 scsi.
I think you would get better bang for the buck if you went with 2 - 4GB of SDRAM. If you want speed, you absolutely DON'T want swapping. 2GB SDRAM should cost about 1/4 as much as the 1GB Rambus...
Also, I don't know what your exact application specs are, but the video card is overkill if you aren't doing 3D. A Matrox G200 would work just fine.
Dan
When was the last time the US military came out and defended you from an invading force?
Unknown. When was the last time anyone tried to shoot the President? Long time? Secret Service must be obsolete, too.
Point is, the Army is a preventative (ideally) AND curative (sometimes) measure.
How often do they kill people, not involved in forces invading the US, each year?
I don't understand the question. Are you saying you care about the freedom of only those people with the good fortune of having been born a US citizen?
,br> It's pretty clear. They are in the business of killing people.
What do you suggest we do with a tyrant? Explain how nice freedom is and hope he understands?
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Forget the P3's and go with Athlons. As for the LS120, be careful with them. The power supply pins are VERY fragile. I went to use mine after like 6-8 months of not paying attention to it, and lo and behold it wasn't working because the pins all broke off. :)
By the way, where are all the SMP Athlons? A year ago everyone was saying "by the end of 1999," but I see none. Going from a K6-2/450 to Athlon/550 nearly halved the time to compile things. I can't wait to reap the benefits of two of these suckers.
Call it a personal quibble (which is why I'm posting this annonymously), but I'm not so hot about the Army's choice of Wide SCSI as a backup option; while recent builds have allowed for more stability, the bus has been a total nightmare for myself & a couple others I know (and that was just with standard SCSI!) The thought of high-volume memory storage on Ultra-Wide for something as serious as Army applications (field engineering and disaster relief, commumications relay & reconnaisance, etc.), coupled with the tendancy of hardware drivers to collapse after less than a full year's install on some builds makes me shiver.
Myself, I'd run Linux with Solaris on an array of Alphas for the SCSI tasks. But that's just my unpopular opinion.
If it is specialized, I would recommend a simple window manager such as BlackBox or IceWM. There is no need to burden your system with unnecessary tools and applications. If, on the other hand, it is going to be a user friendly system, I'd have to recommend using KDE or GNOME, giving preference to your personal aesthetics. The added complexity of GNOME or KDE should be justified.
In terms of hardware, I must point out that USB support will not be available until kernel 2.4, IIRC, but that will be arriving soon. Also included will be firewire support, again IIRC, which should encourage you to investigate using that as a possible alternative to SCSI. Again, it is application dependent, and also subject to some personal preference.
In terms of video, the Diamond Viper is a bit of overkill if you'll be using BlackBox or IceWM, and you could save yourself a bit of money by getting something a bit less hefty, and possibly including TV support, such as the ATI Rage128. Since the TNT2 chipset is being backed by NVidia under Linux, it is a decent choice, IMHO.
With respect to the processor of choice, I see no real reason not to get an AMD instead of an Intel if the price is right and the speed is sensible. Alternatively, with Linux, you can go completely Alpha, or Sparc (although I would avoid Sparc, but that's a personal aesthetic thing), and not have to really worry about interoperability with other platforms given the nature of Linux.
Well, I hope that helps.
From Episode 1F14, "Homer Loves Flanders" (as stolen by me from snpp.com):
----
The Simpsons watch yet another edition of "Eye on Springfield", with your host, Kent Brockman.
Kent: Tonight, on "Eye on Springfield": just miles from your doorstep, hundreds of men are given weapons and trained to kill. The government calls it the "army", but a more alarmist name would be -- "The Killbot Factory."
----
Always cracks me up when I see that one.
Actually the Armys business is maintaining a free country so ungrateful pieces of trash like you are free to spew garbage from your mouth. It's full of soldiers who are willing to risk their lives to provide you with an umbrella of freedom. It's sad that a few minutes of your time is too much to ask from you, when they are willing to give up all their tommorrows for you.
I don't know much about it myself, but I have heard it's good for crunching the kind of data samples you are talking about!
Their goal is to get off of high-priced &
underpowered hardware.
SPARC & Alpha are great, but you pay a massively
inflated price for them...
Mark
calling the pres a prick is a bit harsh, and offtopic don't you believe.
BTW, after watching him on cspan on economic matters, im convinced at what a smart man we have runnning our country, even with obvious faults and problems like us all . thats why im worried about GW Bush, he never comes off as a intelligent man.
"Are you satisfied with fucking?" - Dave Matthews from "Halloween"
36 GB SCSI drive: Why not go with a RAID 5 array?
Use a nice Mylex RAID controller.
Number Nine Video: Bah! Get Voodoo3, baby!
DVD drive: I don't see the point in having a DVD
drive since the DVD consortium is being openly
hostile to the Linux community. CDROM drives are
still more pratical at this stage in the game.
Misc Advice: If you're going to buy 10 exact
duplicates of this machine here's how to make the
install easier/faster on the other duplicate
machines:
1. Make the hard drive a single partition. You
shouldn't need a swap partition with 1 GB RAM.
OK, you may need one swap partition just to be
safe.
2. Install the OS, then install all the drivers
like the Voodoo driver, and the SB Live drivers.
Setup X just they way you want it. Install all
your favorite software.
3. "tar -xfp" the entire hard drive from the
root directory down. Copy this tar file onto
a CDROM disc.
4. On the other machines, boot from a linux boot
disk, partition the hard drive, pop the master
image CD in the CDROM drive, untar the master
image file onto the hard drive. Run lilo to make
the hard disk bootable.
SMP is a good idea, if your application is calculation-intensive. If it is merely I/O intensive, then you have another ballgame.
RAID is a good idea for I/O heavy traffic, when that traffic exceeds the capability of a single disk. Caching is an option, but we're looking at a constant stream of new information, rather than reusing existing information. Thus you want a pipeline which can deliver data to the final medium (disk) quickly without eating up additional CPU cycles or unnecessary I/O bandwidth.
RAID-0 is a good choice in this case, with a hardware-based controller and 4 or 5 drives. The data is streamed to the controller at speeds approaching the bus limit, and the controller fans out the load to individual drives without any system overhead.
I don't believe data-guarding (mirroring or parity) is warranted in this case. A workstation does not need 24/7 uptime, and I doubt the application would be able to "pick-up" where it left off if a fatal error occurs. Plus one would expect the products of this process to be backed up immediately to another medium, rather than left on harddisks.
-b-
Actually, the Microsoft Intellimouse works very nicely under Linux/XFree86. I recently used one on a Netfinity at work because i knew it could be used as a three-button mouse, and it was handy. To my pleasant surprise, i found out that the wheel also moves an xterm scrollbar! What a great feature!
But a DVD drive? Um, guys, they aren't really supported well yet.
---
120
chars is barely sufficient
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Why not a nice AMD K7 ? And a DVD RAM drive (toshiba) which can also read DVD-ROMs ?
you have 25 gallons of semen in your stomach and you dare talk about prick...oh, wait...you're not that Rod Stewart. sorry.
I think Linux is an excellent match for a place like the Army as they have tons of resourc3es to maintain their own internal code fork to fit their own internal needs in the most reliable way. Not to mention that internal expertise on the OS would make important defense systems easier to fix and extend in times of crisis. OTOH, nothing disturbs me more than using Intel based machines for such a venture.
Intel is nice and all for toys. But even imagining an Intel based machine in the hands of an Army programmer who needs to fix code or people die, really scares me. I've used a lot of Intel based machines in my life, and almost all of them were crap compared to their custom-built UNIX counterparts. Their components fail far too often, their archetecture is woefully un-scalable, the interchangable parts of a PC make it hard to get an effecient system case for cooling or for ease of maintenance, they make poor use of space, they're ugly, and their build quality is sad at best. Incedentally most of this isn't Intel's fault, it's just the way the crumby boxes are designed. They sure are cheap though.
-Rich
I use a number of Tulip cards, but I've had a hell of a time getting the things to stick on 100 instead of 10. Maybe it is just my 10/100 switch, but the Windows machine on my network is the only one that will consistently hold 100.
Has this problem been solved? I haven't checked in over a month, but last time I did I pulled down the latest driver, read the FAQs, recompiled, etc... I still can't get anything but 10 reliably, and when I do get 100, I get so many lost packets that anything more than a telnet or SSH session will die on me.
Interestingly enough, my laptop with a 10/100 3Com card comes up 100 every time. Although RH 6.1's netconfig dumps core each time I use it, it still brings the card up just fine.
The business of the Army is to protect your rights to anonymity (posting as an AC), and free speach (posting as an AC), and liberal technology use (posting as an AC), and maintaining the US in a position that allows you to have an enjoyable standard of living (posting as an AC).
Their presence, and successful killing of people who would otherwise be running your life, is what provides for your right to choose to be a pacifist. Their existence is also what provides for your right to not contribute to their efforts. Were it not for someone standing guard, you might be tortured into providing the desired information against your will.
Being an immigrant, I fully support and appreciate the US armed forces. Thanks to them, dissidents and people with unpopular (non-state-sponsored) views have a chance to be heard. They even have an opportunity to spew their self-righteous opinions without spending more than two seconds thinking about their validity. Their only fear of retribution being that of someone else exercising their own God and Country assured right to free speach and a differing opinion.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I love mine. The entire 900 line has given me nothing but sticky sweet high throughput... I know nothing of their quality record, but I've never had a bad one.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
The first three companies are pure Linux. The fourth is getting good advice on Linux systems from people in the community.
You absolutely want as little variation on your hardware as possible with these machines. This will up the price of each machine. However, it will also make them easier to maintain, repair, upgrade and find drivers for. The additional expense pays off in the long run, if you are going to deploy thousands of these things. Make this a condition of your contract.
Personally, I say go with ASL, if only because they're nice guys.
NB- I don't work for any of these companies, even (as far as I know) indirectly.
Finding God in a Dog
>Linux with Solaris on an array of Alphas for the SCSI tasks Solaris doesn't run on Alphas.
my real name is rob. hehe. i love rod stewart for one reason, the song: "if you want my body and you think im sexy". come on how can you not love him. plus he's 'tapped' all those supermodels, to me hes god like.
BTW, songs like maggie whatever make no sense to me.
"Are you satisfied with fucking?" - Dave Matthews from "Halloween"
IIRC, a 128Mbyte stick of PC800 RDRAM (fastest currently available) will set you back around $1200.
EEEEEK!!!!!!
I have a feeling this sounds like a storage machine - means you should have a good amount of ram, but regular PC100 or PC133 will work fine. Dual processors? maybe, if you are doing stripeing or mirroring with your disks.
Also don't limit yourself to RedHat - remember redhat is not linux - you can go ahead and look at debian, stormix, mandrake, suse, and the rest for a distribution that fits your needs, or one that just spikes your interest. (I personally like stormix)
if you can get past the windows mentions, look at the god-box and the other boxes over at Ars Technica. They have some great reccommendations on good value hardware.
Lastly, i saw a few complaints about the 3c905b cards in earlier posts. We religiously use these cards (albiet in windows NT machines) here at work and have had nothing but good experiences with them. I love the 3com and i have a hard time using anything else (execpt if it is free of course :-> )
--onyx--
I really don't think this is a significant matter for machines that are either:
- Not required to be particularly secure, or
- Are housed in rather secure environments.
It's fair to say that AMD might provide "better bang for the buck;" the insecurity of microcode is, however, something that organizations have been coping with since microcode computers were invented, which likely dates back to the '60s.As for "You'd never know it," a secure US Army site is likely one of the places to which Intel would be willing to release secrets as to protocols necessary to validate that the microcode hasn't been tampered with, no?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Why do you need one other than to watch the Army Navy game whils't you process data.
but those who choose nationalism before Zen always have the biggest mouth
"the pres. is a prick"
gee, over here in ireland we happen to think he's an ok sort of guy. thanks to his ability to get people talking, and by appointing george mitchell, we now have done a great deal to stop killing and bombing in n. ireland.
he's been president while the us was having a period of very large growth, and has tried to get y'all a sensible health care system. sure he has personal problems, but bertie ahern has a mistress and we focus more on what he does wrt his *job* and not what he does with his family life. america was founded by people that the english found to be too uptight - and it still shows.
otoh you have people in congress like jesse helms, strom thurmond, and a host of other sleazebags. and that newt gingrich character, whew, scary guy.
back on topic: the us army computers. are there issues with the large ram requirements? and you can dump the video card. set up redhat w/ kickstart and a serial terminal and if need be use a term server to watch over them and admin them in cases where the network connection fails. the nice part here is that you can use the term server connections to test uptime, etc.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Im not really familar with the support of that video card under linux. I'd check it to be sure under Xfree86 as well XIG. If you are going to be looking at sat images and want a card like that you probably want good hw accelerated for a final result. I dont know of any really good OpenGL (assuming thats what you might use) accelerted cards that fully support Opengl. Again, I dont know too much about THAT card..but I'd make sure the video card you choose can meet your reqs... fast 2d... good 3d...whatever.
I finally got in touch with my inner child...he's a little shit.
What confirmation do we have that this is actually a question from the Army, and not an average user looking for a quick review of the system he's planning on buying? The list looks like it's copied straight from a manufacturer's web page (note the warranty info, and inclusion of basic peripherals), and several posters have pointed out that the components don't match up well with the intended use.
Or, I suppose it could have very poorly researched.
Shawn: Stick with the SGIs and quit chasing fads. It's not like SGIs stopped being good computers. If you already own the SGIs, it sounds like the more expensive option is buying computers to replace them. Use all that money that you would've spent on new hardware and give it to the boys -- they're already underpaid enough as it is. Honestly, the idea that the US Army would use Slashdot for their recommendations is silly. It gives me a pretty good twinge of fear about our national security. Do you really speak for them, and if so, could you please give us your full name?
Cliff: Next time, just stick with giving us the story instead of posting an incorrect Slashdot article (the Navy/NT one) that is going to serve absolutely no other purpose but to turn part of the discussion into unnecessary flames. If you want to start a flame war, at least start it with something based on the truth.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
If its dropping packets, check your cables.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
I could say alot of bad things about the Army,but I wont .It put me through college. I can honestly say my life is better for having served .
Use BSD. And hire a BSD expert as a consultant. This is not the environment for Linux. Trust me.
Their business is killing people, something I don't agree with. So, no advice from me.
/. readers aren't, but guess what! There ARE other free countries in the world!
I fully agree.
Something worth considering before starting ye 'ol patriotic spitting and steaming about protecting the American Idea might be if the target of your promilitary rage is a citizen of the U.S. of A.
I'm not, and I'm sure that a helluva lot of
Now you are free to call me a commie subversive coward (can't be bothered to create an account) but the way i see it is this:
I can't make war disappear tomorrow, but i CAN take the first step, and that is to refuse to be a part of it myself.
These machines soundz spiffy and all, I have run similar machines to these sans i840, but I have to disagree with your choice of video card and nic, If your not pushing any rendering through your video card i'd dump that lame old TNT2 and get a card which is far superior as far as usability goes, like a Matrox Millenium 2; i whould not use a 3com NIC in a military spec system, unless you have drivers I haven't been told about. I think your missing the boat on this one(j/k), Your spec is lacking TONS of detail in that, I would rather have a P3b-F BX motherboard from Asus than an Intel Spec i8440 Board from Intel.
Given the target processor (700+ mhz Intel) you might as well be looking at an Alpha box; overall performance is likely to be much better (assuming the code has been ported over) the alpha box will let you get away with significantly more cache and memory then its intel counterpart and in this power bracket the price range is similar.
You dont have to agree with the killing people part, but not everyone in the Army is involved in offensive capabilities. They do a lot of basic research, and do a lot of defensive things to allow you to express the opinion you just expressed. The Army employs scores of people who have never shot an enemy or been deployed in a forward area to get rid of an enemy. The Army is almost directly responsible for the first non-soviet artifical satelite. The millitary has been behind countless technical innovations that make your life the way it is, RADAR, plastics, commerical aviation, the Internet etc. Their business is to protect Americans and to protect the American way of life. That does including killing people but it also includes engaging in research to use technology to their advantage, the fruits of which are all around us today.
-Rich
Even though no security is 100% it couldn't hurt to have the box surrounded by tanks like that Apple in that Macintosh commercial.
>;)
-Vel
This is not the US Army's fist implementation of the LINUX operating system. I was lucky enough to field an intelligence analysis tool running LINUX a couple of years ago. It was great fun getting paid to play with LINUX!
I fully agree.
Something worth considering before starting ye 'ol patriotic spitting and steaming about protecting the American Idea might be if the target of your promilitary rage is a citizen of the U.S. of A.
I'm not, and I'm sure that a helluva lot of /. readers aren't, but guess what! There ARE other free countries in the world!
Now you are free to call me a commie subversive coward (can't be bothered to create an account) but the way i see it is this:I can't make war disappear tomorrow, but i CAN take the first step, and that is to refuse to be a part of it myself.
I would recommend avoiding Diamond Multimedia like the plague. In my experience, there products are consistently over-hyped, under-supported, and come with horrible, horrible drivers. They are also quite a bit more expensive than video cards based on the same chipset (TNT2) made by different manufacturers. I have the Creative TNT2, and it's a good card. I have also heard that Guillemot make a good TNT2. You might want to look at the Matrox G400 - great 2d + 3d image quality, fast, and I have heard the Linux drivers are very good - as good or better than the Windows drivers, even. John Carmack (lead programmer of Quake/Doom/etc) is part of the team writing the open source (glx) drivers. Rambus RAM sucks, from what I have heard. Very high latency, although some pretty impressive bandwidth. Before paying for these machines I would recommend you try them out - Rambus might let you down.
What do you think "CPUs (2)" means?
I'm with U.S. Army 40th Signal Battalion, and I think this person should not identify himself with the entire U.S. Army. Each Unit has their own automations policies, here in my Brigade we use Windows NT, but many unit's use Unix based workstations. Here I couldn't get anyone to even look at Linux as an option. In certain situations, ie. the project he is talking about they might be approved, but to say that the U.S. Army is looking for help is wrong! You're unit is looking for this help, and considering Linux as an option. Most of the people who work automations for the U.S. Army don't even know how to use NT right, and I don't think that Linux would be a viable alternative considering that people are shifted from station to station, and it would be immposible to setup a network using Linux Workstations, then be sent to another duty station, and be replaced by someone who only knows Windows. I'd love to have an all Linux network, it would make my job a lot easier, but I don't think it can be done without the proper training(which I might add a lot of people never recieve) with Linux computing. Flinn Mueller Automations U.S. Army, 40th Signal Battalion
This is a difficult argument to counter and one I have been dealing with for a long time. As a West Point graduate, I am often asked why I chose to go in the Army. My answer is usually, "Too complex a question for the time alloted for the answer." However, one of the major deciding factors was studying about Mei Lai in high school. THe majority of people in a South Vietnam village were massacred by US troops. Only one person went to prison: The Platoon Leader. I remembered thinking, "If I had been in his position, that would not have happened." That is why a free thinking computer geek from liberal Massachusetts decided to forgo the college (read party) career he had been looking forward to for most of his life to go through the rigors of military schooling and traiing. I graduated and was an Infantry officer (not a very good one, in retrospect).
After vietnam, the Army was viewed as a dishonorable profession. As a result the army of the 1970's was riddled with problems. It took many years and a shift to a president concerned about the military to fix them.
The fact remains that we will have a military. While it would be wonderful if we could ensure world peace without guns and bombs, it is not going to happen soon. Work towards it, it is a wonderful goal. But understand that in the interim there will be men and women standing guard. If we the American public dedicide to treat the profession as honorable, then honorable men and women will be drawn to it. It is not a fixed thing; the attitude we spread today will directly affect the actions of the military tomorrow. Express your concern about the choices the civlian leaders make when they decide to deploy our troops. But support them men and women who have to make very difficult decisions. In short, ensure the morality of the military lines up with the morality of the people. The Military of the past has made mistakes. It is up to us, all of us, to learn from them.
Adam Young,
1LT, Infantry
(USAR)
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
"The US Army is looking for advice on purchasing several high-end Linux
workstations. These systems will be used in a post-flight processing environment. We routinely
process raw data measurements in excess of 1 million samples/second. This processing can
utilize several GB of disk space and up to and exceeding 1GB of RAM."
If this were the case I'd be looking at Compaq's Alpha 21264 boards. I think this is exactly what the Alpha processor and systems are designed to do.
These machines soundz spiffy and all, I have run similar machines to these sans i840, but I have to disagree with your choice of video card and nic, If your not pushing any rendering through your video card i'd dump that gamer TNT2 and get a card which is far superior as far as usability goes, like a Matrox Millenium 2; i whould not use a 3com NIC in a military spec system, unless you have drivers I haven't been told about. I think your missing the boat on this one(j/k), Your spec is lacking TONS of detail in that, I would rather have a P3b-F BX motherboard from Asus than an Intel Spec i8440 Board from Intel. Also As far as storage goes you should at least consider the idea of a RAID, even if it is just a mirror, I've had the best luck with a 9 gig system, and 2 18 gig drives running a mirror(hardware). Last but not least the higher end board manufacturers are begging to ship the new Slot A(k7) motherboards with the new southbridge, I would really consider looking into this just from a performance perspective.
what is sensible about tax dollars being spent on health care; things have worked fine in the US with no public health care for a great length of time. Changing a working system is not a good plan.
Yeah their business is break things and kill people. They're also keeping your ass free to speak things like that. Think about that the next time you read an article about China's sucky human rights policies. Why don't you check out that old video of the college students being run over by tanks to get the rights that Americans take for granted.
According to Tom ddram outperforms rambus anyway, due to rambus's inheritantly worse latency. Also if reliability is a concern :-) keep in mind that a slew of Rambus-related problems have dogged the new rambus motherboads/chipsets.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I know /. is pro-linux, but why not OpenBSD? Is a pretty Xwm such a big deal or are my tax dollars going to fund a *really* nice desktop for the US Army's offices?
1 - Dump Intel. Not only do the AMD K7 Athlons run faster then Intel CPU's, they also run on a nice EV6 Alpha modified 200mhz FSB motherboard, and I do belive VIA has a chipset for Athlons which allows PC133mhz SDRAM.
:)
2 - Dump the RAMBUS RAM. Get 1 GIG of PC133 SDRAM
3 - The SB 128 might not work well, I'd actually try to find an old SB16 ISA card seeing as you're not doing sound processing, and it'll more then suffice for any other audio requirements you may have.
4 - I hate to bring up the Disto Holy War(tm), but is Red Hat really a good choice? I find it bloated, slow and insecure. Perhaps Slackware or Debian/Corel?
5 - Someone mentioned the 3c905 drivers not being real mature and suggested dumping that for an Intel card, I have to disagree. I've used 3Com NICs, including the 905, in Linux for years and they work perfectly, I wouldn't change that choice.
6 - DVD Drives aren't really supported, you might want to opt out of that for a nice high speed CD-ROM and possibly add a DVD drive later when there is better (any?) support.
7 - That TNT Ultra card I'm not to sure of, I think there is support for it in Mesa, but don't hold me to that, it really depends on what you're going to be using it for, if you're going to be doing lots of 3D graphics I would, unfortunately, opt for the more supported Voodoo 3, if not the TNT Ultra will be fine but you can cut a corner or two on it and get a Matrox G200 which will do just as well.
8 - USB isnt really supported until 2.4.x, although you kindof get USB ports thrown in free on every motherboard these days.
My 50 cents, sorry I don't have any pennies
-- iCEBaLM
You probably don't want to do RAMBUS; it's expensive and doesn't really offer all that much, performance-wise. Wait a few months for DDR SDRAM -- you'll get similar performance for a much, much lower price.
:)
I do not think you can buy, *anywhere*, a motherboard that will take 1GB of RAMBUS anyway. The design spec is for 3 RIMM slots, providing 768MB, but that nasty bug in the chipset has reduced most boards to 2 slots, or 512MB. I do not know if the chipset can handle chips of greater than 256MB. Even if it can, you will pay such an enormous amount of money for them that you might as well buy Octanes anyway. (256MB chips are running about $12 PER MEGABYTE -- $3000 EACH.) I shudder to think of what a 512MB chip would cost.
If you need to buy right away, you might actually check to see what SGI can offer you in the high end. They're doing a lot of good work with Linux. If anyone can set you up with a seriously kick-ass machine, they should be able to. They have recently released some patches to the kernel that will allow database access directly to the hard drives, for speed -- I would think that would be a likely big win for a high-end, data-intensive environment, assuming you write your own, custom software.
Good luck.
Point by point, dissection of the specs.
1. i840: The best choice of chipset. No complaints.
2. dual ATA-66: Why, beyond the spectre of universal upgradability, would one want integrated ATA-66 when planning to use the 160/M SCSI interface? Perhaps a less expensive board w/o the ATA-66 controller would be a better choice.
3. 2x USB, serial, parallel: No complaints.
4. Integrated Ultra 160/M and U/W SCSI: Good choice if running the two HD 'standalone'. Perhaps a RAID controller on top of it to handle the data spool instead of the single 36 G drive. The controller and smaller SCSI volumes will probably be more cost-effective in the long run also.
5. 733 PIII: Intel may not be terribly committed to releasing faster chips in the slot 1 variety, now that they're also trying the FCs and PPGAs. If you're counting on a brain transplant down the road, perhaps a quad board with two empty slots would serve you.
6. (storage): A single 9G volume for the root fs and a 36+G volume for data is a fair start, but as mentioned earlier, RAID for the data spool may be more cost-effective in the long run. The DVD drive, well, I'll leave it alone.
7. Viper V770: Go with a Matrox, and a G200 at least. Better Linux support and a better card for the money.
8. 3c905: Go DEC Tulip-based instead. It performs better under Linux, and the driver is excellent.
9. SB PCI128: Try a standard SB16 instead. You'll never notice the difference.
10. Keyboard: Please, if there is to be someone typing at it night and day, substitute a more expensive ergo unit.
Remember folks, they'll be spending OUR tax dollars on this, let's give them the best bang for the buck!
.sig: Now legally binding!
"To protect and to serve" is the slogan of the Los Angeles Police Department, not the Army.
I'd ask your SGI sales rep about SGI's current and future linux based hardware. You're already familiar with their products and probably already their support team, and SGI makes some nice affordable linux hardware. http://oss.sgi.com -anon
Maybe things have worked fine for you, but what about people working in minimum-wage jobs with no company-sponsored health plan? They surely can't afford medical insurance on that whopping $5.25/hr they make. Remember, someone has to cook and fill your order at McDonalds (for instance, not implying you eat specifically at McDonalds).
If I lost my well-paying job with great benefits, and, for some reason, couldn't land another one immediately, I'd like to know that I could get medical help if I needed it, without mortgaging the rest of my life away to the hospital. (Wow, that's an extremely convoluted sentence!)
Try thinking about someone other than yourself every once in a while...
Eric
3com has a liftime warrenty policy i believe. if you feel you got a bad batch you should contact them and send them back. my friends scarf up old bad cards from people and send them back for replacements.
i have had good expirences with mine.
john
-- john
If you're looking for speed, and for a cheaper solution, RAMBUS is not the way to go for memory. There is not *that* great a performance increase using this technology to warrent the extra several thousand dollars it's going to cost to perchase just the memory. I would look very closely at Micron's new (though as of yet unreleased technology) that uses DDR ram. It can produce nearly the same bandwidth at litterally a fraction of the cost per megabite. I also see very little need for a DVD drive. Call me picky, but I pay taxxes in this country, and I know how computers work. For less than half the cost, you can get a good old CD rom drive, or for that matter, you could get a CD-R to back things up on. But I think a DVD drive is out of the question unless part of your post mission data analys is playback of some sort of DVD recorded data, this is a waste of my tax dollars.
if (OS==Linux && segfault) {edit_source()} continue;
if (OS==Windows && illegal_operation) {
fdisk();
return Linux;
This seems more like a wishlist for a home PC than a number-cruncher for data analysis. Couple of points to keep in mind when specc'ing hardware for a professional installation (corporate, organizational, or even millitary).
1) Anything you buy today will be hopelessly obsolete in 18 months: that's the PC life-span. Live with it.
2) You will -not- have the time to upgrade these machines. It seems cheaper on paper to swap out video, drives, and motherboards to and from a generic PC. It's not. Factor in: downtime, reconfiguration, getting the new stuff to work, filling out the paperwork for upgrade components, etc, etc, etc. Forklift upgrades are the -only- practical way to run a professional shop. Drive space and RAM should be the only things you touch.
This comes from long personal experience. You can afford the time and effort to screw around with a pieces-parts home machine. It's a whole other story when you are on the company (gov't.) dime.
3) Established, standard components all the way. The bleeding edge is for chumps and loosers and guys with nothing better to do than hack device drivers.
This -includes- OS! Your system vendor should install and support the version of Linux you want to run. No ands ifs or buts.
Bearing these three principles in mind, I would reccomend buying the fastest possible systems you can afford, and go with reliable, mid-range components in standard configurations. Standardization is -key-: bits'n'pieces is no way to run a high-end shop. To achieve this end, talk to VA Research about their Xeons, Penguin Computing about their Athalons, and Microway about their Alphas. Go with their reccomendations, and avoid customizing their standard configurations.
I highly reccomend Alpha hardware for speed, reliability, and compatibility. (Second only to x86) The Alpha/Linux combo has been proven in high-end applications like cinema special effects and weapons engineering supercomputers. (What do you -think- those Beowolfs are used for? Quake servers?)
The faster the system, the longer you have until it obsoletes. Another point in favor of the Alpha. The more vanilla the component, the easier it is to replace in case of failure. Standardize, standardize, standardize!
SoupIsGood Food
Also probably overlooked but as important. You'll need to configure Linux properly. Meaning stripping out all the unneed extras that come with most installs. I always like to recompile the kernel so I don't have any extra stuff in there too.
It is probably going to run at some stupidly high resolution. 21" monitors are the spec. So that means at least 1600x1200, maybe at 32bpp. That's almost 8 Mb just to hold the screen. So maybe having 16 Mb onboard would be more prudent.
Just thinking... if you're going to do number crunching, and recording data off it, why not design a Beowulf cluster from the ground up, say four or eight Celeron 500s with 64Mb each(about $500 each without monitor, keyboard, mouse and video card, but with 100Mbps PCI netcard), hooked up to a RAID Level 5, say some 5 25Gb disks, for 100Gb total disk-space, and a 100Mb-full switch, for a grand total of maybe $6000... and you have one helluva of a data crunching machine...
Just my $0.02
USB
ULTRA/66 (depending on the controller, my promise card works great)
DVD movie playback
I presume the V770 is a TNT2 card, which has much inferior linux opengl support compared to 3dfx cards.
Other than that, it would be a kick-ass linux system!
You need to decide how much you want to bleed. These specs use a NEW motherboard chipset (840), a NEW memory architecture (RAMBUS), and a NEW CPU technology (Coppermine). If you want to pursue this technology, do so with your eyes wide open. This stuff is too new to be really stable. There are bound to be gotchas hiding all over the place. Remember that when it comes to computers, Murphy was an optimist.
Consider a Xeon based system if you really need the raw horsepower, but it sounds like you really want maximum I/O. To get that, look at SCSI RAID controlers, or a non-Intel architecture with a decent motherboard I/O bus. Alpha motherboards have 128 (or even 256?) bit buses. Don't get too hung up on CPU; that's seldom the bottleneck on a new system.
Everything you said was w/ respect to the GL support. Which is very important for games, but pretty inconsequential for a processing machine, which is what these will be.
sb128 is about as cheap as it gets... nor is v770 that expensive, commodity gfx adapters produced in volume today just happen to be pretty good.. you'd have to go shopping for used parts for a sb16 or awe32. The savings for using cheaper parts would be pretty futile anyway when compared to the cost of the other components of the system... So it is not overkill and suits the purpose well - in the configuration, high end components (like rimm memory) are used for where needed (data processing), compared to these the sb128 and the viper are pretty low end choises.
In some ways I agree with you. The US Army has been sent out to many situations that it propably shouldn't have been used for. It's current function as a "Peace Keeping" force is entirely a regime dependant function of the armed forces and may very well result in little peace.
The regime in power decides how the armed forces are used rather than the forces going off and causing havoc on there own. Unfortunately the temptation to use them for political gain always lingers. The Iraq bombing the night before the impeachment vote may be an example of their misuse.
Nonetheless the Army is needed for our national defense. Without it the US would have fallen long ago.
Hi. I have a couple of remarks. Beginning with ...
... And the drivers are all open. If you want better peformance/features you might want to go with matrox' g400 - crisp 2D and GLX is pretty performant already. The moment XFree 4.0 comes out there should be G400 drivers VERY soon after.
* the videocard: If you're only using 2d it's adequate but overkill. A G200 or G400 would likely give better (cleaner) 2D at high resolutions. If however you need opengl accelartion things are ALOT different. Nvidia's TNT driver support is horrible (not performant). I wouldn't count on them (don't want to be an open source zealot, but if the specs are kept closed, you have to always rely on them for drivers) 3DFX actually has the best support for 'other' OS's like BeOS, Mac, Linux,
bottom line: get a G400. - or a Voodoo4 when(/if:) they come out.
* cpu/chipset: i see you went for an smp chipset. that's ok. i really like the 840. Just a couple of things to think about:
- test one out before you buy a bunch of them. You can't afford mobo flakiness. The 840 is very young and untested. Same goes for the (dual channel) rambus. Maybe you should consider a BX/GX board - you'll also save a bunch of money on memory (1 gig of rambus memory - money must be of no concern). Are these workstations mission critical? Think about that too. If you need uniprocessor boards i'd consider athlons (depending again what you think is most important: performance/cost or maturity) * scsi: I'm not sure if you need this. If you only use one or two harddrives you won't notice much performance gain. If you absolutely need to blow some money, by all means do. OTOH, if you intend to often use more than 3 harddrives/devices on the bus at thesame time, like in raid configurations or heavy duty workstation stuff, or you need to attach plenty of devices to your chain (scsi zip/cd/writer/dvd/scanner/harddrives/...) you might get good use out of scsi.
btw: are you sure the Adaptec ultra 160/m is already supported under linux??
Having been there and served there, I assert that anyone that has seen combat understands the utter profanity of war. No sane General wants to send his troops into battle, no sane person wants to go, but by being prepared to go and being the best possible army, one that is so far above defeat that no other country will think it wise to start a war, we try avoid the very thing that we prepare for.
Remember that Generals don't run the country (and for good reason) the civilians do. If the army is out doing things that offend you, you have the rarest of priviledges. You can freely vote to remove those that control the army and replace them with folks that think like you, and, get this, that very army stands ready to protect your right to do so. Help them or not, it is your right but never forget that it was the army that bought that right for you.
3Com is good--some of their cards were what we built the Internet on. They have experience, and a liftetime warranty--but sometimes you might replace crap with crap. Unfortunately, there are too many bad stories about the top-line 3Com 3C905 to put it in an important system. The 905 does 100 MBit, contrary to aforementioned belief.
Let us know what you find.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
What's with all the Anonymous Cowards... If you are proud of your country USE YOUR NAME... This thread is so off-topic it's hardly worth replying to, but any American should feel obligated to.
It makes me sick to see the teen-ager "I hate the government" attitude people take under the clock of Anonymity. I don't know if the poster was an american citizen or not, but if he was, I would be happy to take you out on a boat, find you an Island and name it "IThinkIKnowABetterWay" and let you rot.
Oh, and if you don't think we fight to defend our country, tell that to the millions of people who have lost family members when they come knocking on your door, myself included.
Have a good day.
wasn't Rod reviled for his dalliance with Disco? i always liked that song too and I laughed at people who disliked it. let's face it, Rod isn't exactly a heavy rocker.
Dump Rambus, SDRAM is fast enough and you can get a whole lot more of it. Get a cheaper video card and sound card, don't need it unless you are into multimedia crap. With millions of records your big limiting factor is going to be THROUGHPUT. WIth the money you save get 4 18Gig drives and a raid controller. Do raid 1 (mirror) for fastest throughput with a quick recovery. Anybody who has worked with large databases will tell you that your HD performance/bandwidth is going to be the big issue. IT will cost you, but worth it in the long run.
Can't wait for the 'Linux classified as a weapon ' ad campaign. Imagine an army of camo-clad Tuxes invading a certain corporate complex in Redmond, WA.
Anybody got the idea that some general sitting in his office wanted a new computer cause his old one can't play Quake III?
US Army protecting our rights is hogwash. The US Army should more appropriately be labeled as protecting special interests and corporations (i.e. the rich). As Thomas Jefferson once said "once business and special interests unite with the govenment and military for mutual benefit the citizens rights will start going down the drain." He is right and that is exactly what is happening. In Florida for example, the US Army Corp of Engineers is involved with major destruction of the environment under the guise of environmental improvement. The COE has destroyed more of the worlds environment than any single entity in the world probably. The CORPS is being used by special interests to harness water resources (at a huge expense to the fragile environment of Florida, including the Everglades and the Coral Reefs in the Florida Keys) for the economic privileged developers which include the Governor of the State of Florida, two US Senator, and numerous others too many to count. They have also mastered the art of public relations bull-shit to make you guys believe that they really are protecting your rights. From what? Who is going to attack us, Iran, NOT! The only reason we have terrorists and tiny underpowered enemy countries is because the terrorists hate our bullying military. We don't need them any more. And if they need help with a Linux workstation why don't they contract out for it and pay back some of those hard-earned dollars to a US small business to repay some of the ridiculous amount of taxes they take out of our wages.
From my time at a USMC air station, I think I know the systems being referred to. Changes I would make would be putting in an Athlon 750, if a better video card can be afforded buy it, and try to get more hard drive space(for any of you who think the video or hard drive is overkill, you haven't seen these things). And get the fastest hard drives available. As for a user interface, X windows and a basic window manager should be plenty. Find someone to code full 3D-Now support for linux. It may already be there, but I'm not sure. The sound card used is good enough, it sucks for midi but otherwise is a great card. You could probably get away with a cheaper card though. Some sort of large scale removable storage would be good. At least a ZIP 250. Otherwise, your specs look pretty good.
all i have 2 say is yuck:P the pentium 3 is a nice proccessor, but i dont think it would b that great for what u want. i'd go with a Alpha cpu or a Athlon. or if u really want power go with a PowerPC G4 chip:) u'd b able 2 get better results. and i wouldn't use a LS-120 either. they're nice and all, but the one i have died bout a week after i got it. it works kinda still, but only after u put the disk in and remove it then put it back in then move it round in the drive some. i'd recomend a Zip drive.
ATHLON WON'T DO BECAUSE THERE ARE NO DUAL ATHLON BOARDS AVAILABLE!!!!!!!!
Maybe someday freedom will exist without the need to protect and sustain it. Fortunately in the US and other enlightened nations the military is subservient to a freely elected government.
If they're the flawed Linksys cards, I have a 'hack-around' that works for me to prevent the 10-100 drops. Send me mail if you'd like it.
.sig: Now legally binding!
It is not overkill. I know the systems they are referring to. I would reccomend even more video RAM. These things do full terrain modeling and flight planning, you'd be surprised the amount of information they process.
I've always been kind of partial to Linksys personally. When all else has failed, I've used it in my boxes and it ran just dandy. I've had some problems with the 3com 905b in the past too so that's just my two cents :-)
moderate the hell out of this please. I had to comment though. sorry.
Please use the fxp(4) driver for network use.
Funny, I thought this was slashdot.org.
Personally, I find nothing wrong with nationalism - it's zealots that are the problem. When you have a bunch of people who are so deadset with "This is my country. Love it or leave it.", there is no room for growth. It is the sign of a closed mind that knows nothing of the rights and freedoms they supposedly are defending. It is also a sign of ignorance. The inability, not to mention unwillingness, to look at other cultures and governments to see how they are operating, what their successes are, what their failures are, and use those to examine your own is a major flaw with the zealot.
When Clinton tried to get universal health care, it wasn't just the Health Insurance business up in arms about it. Everyday people were because they viewed it as Socialist, which must mean it's Communist, which is distinctly "Un-American", and therefore inherently wrong.
People in this country are victims of their own closed minds and narrow points of view. If it doesn't change, it will be the end of this country. The lack of challenge and the willingness to accept whatever the government and corporate powers hand down is much too common today, IMHO. My parents anger me because of their inability to accept people with different views and lifestyles than their own. My wife angers me with her unwillingness to acknowledge corporate greed and indifference. (She did most of her holiday shopping with Amazon, despite my protests against doing so due to the patent fiasco.)
If people don't begin to wake up and question their surroundings, the soldiers will be fighting for no reason. No rights to defend, no freedom to experience. Total conformity.
Though, on the plus side, people wouldn't be pissed at one another for what they've said or done.
Just my $0.02.
-NYFreddie
Barbie of Borg - She doesn't just Assimilate, She Accessorizes too!
A little background. I currently work for Intel/Linux.com (sponsord by VA), but I am giving my honest opinon. My views don't necessarily represent the views of Linux.com or Intel. =p This information is from experience at UCLA Medical with image reconstruction machines, which I hope closely resemble what you plan to do with your machines. I do recommend PIII-733s because they support SMPs. Athlons, though a great chip, don't run in SMP mode yet. Having two PIIIs in a box will make your data processing twice as fast if they have multiple data sets. We tested similar machines (in terms of cost) on a dataset that required both floating point and integer preformance, and found the Intel machine to be faster than Sun's offerings. Since they are only processing datasets, there is no need for "Enterprise Reliability." If something breaks, load the dataset again, and run it on a different machine. No harm done. I would recommend getting 2gB of RAM. Nothing like keeping the CPU fed with data to keep it happy. Having enough memory for the job comes in second, right after cpu speed in these situations. The RIMMs however, should be avoided at the moment because they haven't been throughly testing in production environments yet, and neither are the 840 chipsets, but if you're feeling lucky, by all means do it, and post back to /. with your experiences. =) You can drop the UltraIDE, since you won't need them. It will only add cost. Stay with Ultra Wide SCSI since SCSI-160 isn't fully tested or widely available. You video card is fine, but if you're really looking to save another 100 bux, turn it into a S3 (w/ 8mB of RAM to handle the resolution of a 21"). You can likewise drop the DVD/PCI Soundcard. There is no need for them in this type of machine. Forget the powered speakers. You can drop your LS120 disks too. Also, the 3com905b network card performs poorly under linux, and is outright unsupported in most cases. Other 3com PCI 100/10bt network cards are preferred, or the Intel Ethernet Express Pro 100/10 series network cards. If you need to transfer data sets, use the network. If you're looking for full service w/o the hassle, I've had great experiences with Penguin Computing and VA Linux.
I have picked up handfulls (literally) of them secondhand and never had a problem (i have had problems with other cards tho). But considering the machine(s) and future expansion capabilities a pci 100Mbit card might be a better choice.
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
Alphas offer better performance than Intel, plus they are 64-bit. If you are tossing around GB of data the ability to directly address very large amounts of memory is going to matter. Linux on Intel today is able to handle 2-4 GB of RAM (depending on patches) but you can't address all of that. (You can map it - which is what databases want to do with it.) Likewise 2.4 extends that to 64 GB, but you cannot address it all.
Another benefit is security. Look at the LinuxPPC test. Even without their fixing a known hole, nobody could break in for a long time because you have to write assembler for the PowerPC chip which few people know. Alphas are not Intel, and that could well work to their advantage...
So was this even considered?
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
If your computer techs are used to working with SGI, Red Hat might not be your best Linux migration.
Red Hat generally uses GUI tools to alter scripts that might be easier for your staff to hand edit.
Get with them and talk over the different distributions, or maybe even look at FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
Find the software that will be easiest for your shop to migrate to.
Another thing to watch out for is that RAMBUS RAM is 5x or more to that of standard SDRAM/SGRAM prices. Tom's Hardware did a review of a new DDR board by Micron (called the Samurai) that shows equal promise with much less expensive RAM. unfortunately it is not available yet...but I have heard that the potential for US Gov. funding tends to make prjects "move faster" :). The review is here There is a discussion of what DDR means at the link. This still doesn't get you away from the Intel chips though. Hopefully with luck someone else will pick this up for the Athlon before long. (I drool at the thought of a DDR Kryotech K7...)
- Sig
Why don't you setup a Beawolf cluster with a network storage array. That will let you easily scale your environment by adding another node to the cluster.
i can't seem to justify in my mind why we would give free tech advise to these hethens. i know, i know: respect DARPA, remember the work militaries have done for cyprtography. somehow the idea of the strongest military in the world being friendly to open source just doesn't make sends. it just doesn't sit right with me. then, and i expect to be flamed for this, shouldn't the government be using OpenBSD for security reasons anyway?
i guess not, since it looks like they are hellbent on linux. now the question is that if the army techs out there decide to patch the kernel or some other system, what are the chances that they will release the improved code?
I think you either need to feed us more information or sit down and think the requirements through more. What are your requirements, just cheaper but doesn't matter if slower, cheaper with a speed increase, need a signifcant speed increase but need a less expensive upgrade, what do you need to do?
What are you going to do about the 2 Gig file system limit in Linux, there are ways around it but they are not rock solid as of yet, I would not trust them as of yet. Are you using Linux for Linux sake or because it's got the cool name right now? What other OS's have you checked out *BSD, Solaris x86, Sco, etc. (some of them suck greatly but my fit the task very well)
What is the current limitation of the existing box? Memory, CPU, I/O, etc. check out the existing box by using "osview" or PCP if you have purchased it, and see where you limitations currently are. You may be putting in a very expensive solution to find out your problem existing somewhere else completely.
You may run into big time speed related memory issues. SGI's are used for doing graphics, etc. because they are able to do so much with ram quickly. Octanes aren't number crunching machines, but they will fly in having to push around memory. x86 line you have to go through hoops to get to ram (bus, etc.) which may significantly limit you in being able to get data to the CPU fast enough.
If you are pushing around that much data in memory, I'm going to assume you have to throw it out to storage sometime (you actually do want to do something with it) you want, no NEED more spindles, your one drive is going to be munched. If you are currently running into a wall here, you are going to be hard pressed into getting the performace that you got out of your Octane, (I'm using an Octane right now), possibly all that may be needed is additional local storage so you can have more spindles taking data off. No other platform can push data around as fast as SGI, I/O SGI's run circles around any box I've ever seen.
You need to decide what you want this box to do (program iteration has to run at least this fast), THEN you get hardware around it. There is a much bigger picture that has to be looked at first, because the CPU speed. is a very, very small part of the equation. Everything relies on everything else, how fast can I get data on/off the drives, am I going to run into contention on the bus, will I actually slow down because I can get data from HD to ram to cpu fast enough?
i can't seem to justify in my mind why we would give free tech advise to these hethens. i know, i know: respect DARPA, remember the work militaries have done for cyprtography. somehow the idea of the strongest military in the world being friendly to open source just doesn't make sense. it just doesn't sit right with me. then, and i expect to be flamed for this, shouldn't the government be using OpenBSD for security reasons anyway?
i guess not, since it looks like they are hellbent on linux. now the question is that if the army techs out there decide to patch the kernel or some other system, what are the chances that they will release the improved code?
The Intel chipset is a good choice. However, the Athlon has much better performance when it comes to processing floating point calculations.
I would not use the the Rambus mems though. You will be much better off with PC133 and can probobly get close to 2 gigs of it for your 1gig O Rambus. All of that aside from the recent Intel/Rambus fiasco.
The storage looks good. I would however use 10,000 RPM U/SCSI drives accross the board and mirror the data partitions with a hardware RAID. RAID 5 them only if data integrity is priority. The mirror will give you faster response times than the stripe.
The Sound and video are overkill. I'd go with something a bit less costly like an AWE16 SoundBlaster and an ATI RAGE.
The NIC is a good choice. Never had any issues with them.
****************
d_linux@pacbell.net
... if the kernel(s) don't support i840, there's no point getting them if you want to run Linux. Besides, RAMBUS is very expensive technology that might not become popular for a long time, as long as other solutions yield very close performance at much lower cost. Check out Tom's Motherboard homeworld for benchmarks.
RAID is faster for read data from a disk, but actually slows down on writing when compared to a single disk drive setup. When you gather data you are primarly writing and not reading.
I guess it may be possible to have a data speed up if you implement RAID 0, but you also multiply your chances of having a HD failure ruin your data by the number of HD's you have in the RAID setup.
- Sig
The requirements are much less per machine (usually only a processor, memory, and sometimes a harddrive (depending on how much memory is required).
It almost looks like the intended use will be a virtual playback of the flight for general analasys/review.
I would probably reccommend consulting with VA Linux. They have experience with beowulf, server, single/multi processing systems, and they offer support (it can be helpful if you want to actually get things done, instead of learning in depth about the internals of linux.)
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
No matter the reality of the system or procedure discussed...whether it exists or not, the fact of the matter is that "shawn", signing his name as "US Army Test Facility" is no more an official query into a hardware configuration than someone signing "Bill" looking into telemetry protocol information for battleships. This is some hotshot who thinks he can make a system work better, and wants to use Linux to do it. DVD on an Army system is as laughable as replacing customized SGI systems with a put-together Linux system. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but the Army is not going to endorse circumventing the almighty contract system to save a few bucks. GTE (now General Dynamics) owns the CHS-2 (Common Hardware System 2) contract, which basically puts the whole Maneuver Control System on hardened SPARC20's with an old (but customized) version of slowaris...and all the support you can shake a stick at (Hell, I have 24 hour access to six different General Dynamics support techs. On the ground here with me. Let's see Red Hat pull that off). Given this fact, and based on the critical mass of data this person is talking about processing, the official Army stance is more than likely along the lines of "Keep what we have, research and contract the replacement", not "Hey shawn, why don't you ask around and get a better hardware/OS solution from your buds on the web"....Bottom line, the "army" isn't looking for Linux to replace an existing system. "Shawn" is misrepresenting himself as acting in an official capacity for the Army. If "shawn" is a contractor looking to win a bid for a contract to replace the existing system, then he shouldn't be signing "US Army Test Facility".
Sorry... 15 years in the service has taught me two very important things- One, you get no where trying to go around the system, and Two, never make the mistake of thinking you are an official representative of your organization, unless you are actually appointed as such (oh..those official representatives know their lanes).
You may want to check out www.penguincomputing.com
I think you just might find exactly what your looking for there at a reasonable price.
I'm a little confused about the money aspect... if they want to save money, RDRAM isn't the way to go. If I were they, I'd wait for multi k7/DDR sdram, if they want to stay low-end. As for the TNT2 ultra...have fun playing quake. It's a gamer's card...I'd choose something that has better 2d or openGL-design oriented 3d. Maybe a geforce or quadro. Of course, maybe the military doesn't want to wait for Nvidia's new drivers to play quake 3... I think I might go in different directions, if I were they. Quad xeons, if I wanted pure processing power...these machines sound just a bit too much like a rich kid's game machine. Are they going to start training foot soldiers to get lots of frags in quake? Hmmm...
Video Card: The selected card is nice and ok, but you're better off with a Matrox G400 (About the same visual quality, and under Linux, it's currently way faster- with no real signs from NVidia that they're going to open up or that they're going to be expedient in resolving this situation...) Mouse: Intellimice are ok, Logitech mice (and, more specifically, their trackballs) are better with the exception of the newest mouse from MS. If trackballs are an option, the marble line from Logitech will perform better and survive longer for the same basic price. LS-120: Why LS-120- is the Army using that extensively? If it isn't, you might want to evaluate something more along the lines of a Jaz or an Orb that would provide much higher capacity storage and interoperability (if you chose some common filesystem format, you could concievably hook in one of these drives into your old Irix and Solaris/SunOS boxen and move data, etc. via that route...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Before you get too far ahead of yourself, buying all that hardware, I think you should checkout what's supported. The Red Hat 6.X distro doesn't support some of the things on your shopping list (the video card and the NIC are two that I saw right away).
This isn't to say you can't get it to work--because in most cases you can--but, when you call for support, if you are lucky, the tech will at most give you the URL to download the drivers for the hardware and tell you that the installation instructions "should be on that page or in the tarball". They will not troubleshoot any unsupported hareware problems (I know from experience).
So before spending hours in frustration, or spending dime one of my taxes, check the Hardware Compatibility List for Intel/6.1.
The US army wants us to belive the reason for switching to Linux is because it is cheaper.... well we know the real reason. The army has been begging for Quake for many months and finaly found a way to be able to run it.
Do you have to acquire and process 1 millions samples per second? If so, how are you acquiring the samples?
Or are the samples already stored on a device and they just need to be processed. If this is the case, is the storage device local or does the data have to be accessed over a network?
In either case, how do you expect to store the processed data? Is the system just meant for realtime viewing of the data, or do you have storage requirements like in a database either local or on a server?
Furthermore, without knowing what kind of processing requirements you have, how do you know that Intel is the right architecture for you? Alpha's or PPC's cost a little bit more, but you might get better performance from those systems for what you're trying to accomplish. Also, depending on your processing needs, clustering might be a much more affordable way to process your data.
I used to work on a project where we had to process data for the gov. The bottleneck wasn't in processing the data, it was in getting the database to store the data fast enough.
It's probably none of my business. But when I hear the words like "army is here to protect your freedom and democracry", I can't shut up. In the past century, a military force was required to protect democracry - or maybe we've been convinced to believe so - but now the world is slightly different.
Democracry still has a lot of threats but a foreign enemy is hardly one on the top list. Which country is going to invade the US of A and impose martial law on the country? China? Ha! Ha!
IMHO, among the enemies of democracy are an apathic and misinformed mass, the shallow and uninformative media, the special and business interests who are more or less in control of the government, an bureacracy which is inert to changes (1). Sorry, a top-rated military cannot do a darn thing on these. And, maintaining a healthy democracy is harder than just beating the crap out of every one of your enemies.
I'm not against the military. A well prepared military is *absolutely* essential to protect the *national interest* of the US. But please, national interest is not the same as freedom and democracry.
(1) I don't believe that terrorism is a threat to freedom and democracry. Terrorism *is* a danger to the *US security* and *Americans*. Don't invoke freedom and democracy like some magic words whenever actions against some foreign threats are needed.
- Skip the Intel and RDRAM (ridiculously expensive) and get an Athlon and SDRAM system.
- I'm not a big Red Hat fan, either. When I've used it, the distribution has felt rather "shovelware" to me, with rough edges.
- Look into getting a 100baseT switch so you can run the machines in parallel, Beowulf-style.
- Linux can't really use the intellimouse, but does like a third button, and the intellimouse's is a pain. Get a Logitech 3-button instead.
- Strong agreement about the keyboard. If it's worth a 21-inch monitor, it's worth an equally nice keyboard.
- What the @#$#@ do you need fancy sound for?
The suggesation of just calling up VA and getting info from them is also worthwhile. The people on Slashdot tend to like bleeding-edge sexy tech that requires fiddling, so don't notice reliability as much. VA, on the other hand, has done a great deal of boring work finding reliable components.I always have a hard time trying to find DEC Tulips, so i usualy stick with 3c90x's. Luckily I just recently found someone selling a case of Tulips, I think my searching is going to be over for a while.
...and in 3D, the GL performance may be important. Depends on the data they're collecting. Some of the stuff I did when I worked for one of the Army's contractors could have been better visualized in 3D in real-time or near so. Good 3D inexpensive 3D accel would have merited us evaluating that aspect- as it was, we had no real good options.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
These guys make excellent cases... www.calpc.com Jeff
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
Just my opinion, but these specs seem rather simplistic and inconsistent with the stated purpose of the systems. If you're doing heavy number-crunching and then working with the results to generate human-readable/graphical representations of the data, you're looking at two classes of activity for which you should separate and optimize the system designs. To be more specific, you don't need any sound card, dvd capability, or high-end graphics adapter on a number cruncher, but you need good keyboards, graphics, and the like for the workstations. A lot of thought probably went into the config and purchase of the SGIs; you should do the same here.
:)
So... I would recommend a more radical solution for the number crunching -- perhaps a cluster of systems running Beowolf. In such a config, the need for dual-processor machines is mostly negated, and with the cost savings (switching to common motherboards, processors, and memory) you can cover the extra network cards, ethernet switch, and put in several more single-processor nodes. The Athlon-700 is an ideal processor in this configuration, providing much more bang for the buck, and potentially provides a cheap path into higher-power SlotA processors. Unless your stuff runs entirely in memory, Rambus won't get you much as opposed to PC100/133, don't waste the money. Stick with a 100m Tulip-based ethernet card or three. And for storage, I'd spend some time designing a screamingly fast solution -- maybe you can good use of your existing SGI systems to host a large array (20 or 30 9gb striped scsi drives in a fiber-linked array, a la the Sun SSA114 or whatever SGI's equivalent is.)
For the workstations, I'd agree with the config pretty much as stated, except that I question the necessity of the entertainment components. If workstation processing power is really such an issue that you really need dual cpus, don't run media apps that hork cpu cycles. Buy a Rio, and watch the DVDs at home.
(Of course, now that I think of it, watching DVDs on your new Linux-based system would make the US Army a co-defendant in the recent decss suit... Hey, why doncha leave that in the config...
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
I remember reading that RAMBUS has a high latency, this means that if you actually use your memory(and with something like this I'm betting you do) it will slow you down. Seak alternitives here. I would also recommend the K7(aka Athlon) a much better performace engine, that is unless you are going to make use of the SIMD instructions in the PIII. Remember, measure once, cut twice. Thats a lot of wasted time, and money in this case.
Can someone please explain? I don't know WTF a karma whore is.
I recently set up RH 6.1 with a 100 Mbps network and did an extensive search beforehand for feedback on configuring 100 Mbps cards with 2.2-based kernels. I scanned as many USENET and on-line discussion forums as I could, and cross-checked mentions against Red Hat's 3-tier HW compatibility list.
The 3c905 card is very popular and seems to work correctly for many users, but is only on RH's Tier 3 list, which means that it is compatible but not supported by Red Hat. Other cards that are higher on RH's list, like cards based on the DEC Tulip chip set are also popular, but have generated wildly uneven reports. It seems that cards based on the original Tulip chip set work perfectly, but that DEC sold off the Tulip technology to another company, which kept the name but promptly broke compability with their implementation. Often there are caveats that the card will only work at 10 Mbps, or require that a newer driver be compiled and installed.
The EtherExpress PRO/100 was the only card which was both on RH's Tier 1 list (which means that RH stands behind its correct operation) and registered no complaints that I could discover in discussions.
Alas, this is not typical overkill. The military spends on a budget. While that's no surprise to anyone reading this, you should be well aware that this budget, once allocated, is set in stone. Spending more than what the budget allows for is not allowed, and even if it is, it is frowned upon, and is seen as an indicator of poor performance.
As bad as that may seem, spending underbudget is even worse. When that happens (and you sure as hell don't want that to happen) the budgeting committee takes a look at your expenditures, and notices that you have a surplus. Guess what they decide? They take that money away from you, and reduce your budgetary allotment for next year, leaving you less to work with. Good luck trying to get that money back, because those budget guys are tighter than Ebeneezer Scrooge with lumps of coal.
Also, chances are that it has been 3 or 4 years since they've had a systems upgrade, therefore, one of the things they're looking for in a system is one that will last them a similar period of time.
Additionally, while some of those components may seem extraneous, chances are that during the lifetime of those computers, they will be necessary at various points. For instance, 3D visualization of intelligence and information is certainly a plausible scenario, and who wouldn't want a video card that has solid OpenGL implementation? The TNT2 card is a good choice for that, and it is a solid 2D performer as well.
Finally, this is MILSPEC we're dealing with. MILSPEC leaves absolutely nothing to chance. That is why you see such unimportant information as UDMA66 and the Intellimouse in the spec list. Why was it specified? Because it could be. The military is quite anal about things like that, and whether it's liked or not, everyone in the system has to play that game.
fin.
Back up your statements with facts or go away. Just like Beasties, bitch and moan that Linux is being chosen and not giving any reason to go for something else.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
There are some people who read Slashdot who are unable to come up with any content other than "FIRST POST!" and "GRITS DOWN NATALIE PORTMAN'S PANTS!" Most of this is due to congenital birth defects (primarily from fetal alcohol syndrome.) Some of it can also be blamed on brain damage from drinking gasoline and sniffing airplane glue. Anyway, when these people read a post that is informative enough, insightful enough, or witty enough to have been moderated up above its original posting score, these people become enraged. Physically enraged. (This is another by-product of the birth defects.)
To manifest their rage, they accuse the moderated-up poster of being a "karma whore", because they are jealous of the fact that they are physiologically incapable of posting worthwhile content. Most of the "karma whore" accusers have karma somewhere around -50. They are truly wretched and pathetic creatures, doomed to wander through life shooting up in the trash and giving handjobs for cash. When their time is up and they shuffle off this mortal coil, it will most likely be in some seedy back alley, clothed in only a burlap sack. They are truly people to be pitied.
So a "karma whore" is a Slashdot reader that posts worthwhile content.
That's pretty much it.
I've noticed a lot of people saying to skip the DVD drive since these are production machines, not there for gaming/movie watching, and DVD support under linux isn't great yet. I agreed with this for a while, then had a thought. Perhaps the Army is being forward thinking here. DVD writer support is already in the works, or exists IIRC. No, its not cheap, yet.
Just like CD, DVD will become a very viable method of storing large volumes of data. In that case, these machines won't have to be retrofitted for DVD at a later point. Given the current price of a 10x DVD drive with 40x CD-Rom support, as opposed to a plain 50x 40x CD-Rom, there isn't much reason they shouldn't go ahead and get it now as part of the package deal, have it installed, and ready to go when the need it in a year or two.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
I use this card, and it performs excellently, plus there's good drivers for LINUX.
But the comments suggest it was an interesting story.
Even 2-D, what if you were doing 1600x1200 at 32 bpp? Would extra RAM be wasted?
linksys 100mbs cards are tulip based
Don't assume that you know the purpose that the hardware will be put to. Odds are that a general purpose computer, as is being spec'd, will serve several different purposes before it retires. The one that they are asking for can live quite comfortably in several different environments. And one of those is on a wan, so security is important. Including microcode security.
So is trustworthy software. What this means depends on the purpose of the day, but should always include "I can be sure that this software isn't adding anything behind my back." This is as much a matter of setting things up right as anything else, so for this part, get advice from several different experts (and have your own experts to unify the answers).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I have tried for a good week to get a machine up and going on RH6.0 with 2 3c509b's in it and have turned off the PnP and configured the I/O and IRQ's correctly by hand. And naturally as soon as I got to the point that it -should- work, everything seems stable and yet nothing works. At all.
/chant
*runs around and starts chanting* Linux is a driver nightmare!! Linux is a driver nightmare!!
- 8Complex
Are there any security issues concerning use of
GNOME or KDE due to their network centric nature ?
GNOME -- uses CORBA -- connects thru Net (not raw sockets )... You might want to use PGP with GNOME for strong auth for CORBA client/server ops. Is
such a combo in place ? Anybody knows ?
KDE -- i don't know enough to comment.
-ak
You should consider using AMD Athlon. It gives a higer system bus speed. For your kind of application, there could be significant performace difference.
Siva
I gleaned from what they submitted that they needed speed. If speed is what they want, a Voodoo card would give them a much faster fps rate. However, I don't know what the Army's gonna use some of this stuff for (DVD??), I'm not gonna question our government. ;) I think a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI is the best value. They work very well with Redhat Linux 6.1. Hope this helps.
1st things 1st if this is an office machine please say so, if it is used for analysis or C3 tasks then very basic issues need to addressed - dual 110/230v power supplies - redundant power supplies - redundant disks ie raid 0 minimum A full tower case is probably just not necessay, as are (2 fans to blow over the drive bays). Cost saving doesn't mean crap, peltier coolers are so cheap and if you have 300w power supply driving a glorified desktop they are a much better answer. Chinese company 'Just Cooler' make a drive cooler which is a plate of aluminium with a fan on it you can attach directly to the drive - modify one of these to include a peltier solid state cooler but remeber to include a temp trigger to prevent condensation. The best thing is you can reverse the current to warm the drives up, I don't know if low temp is an issue in America. A basic PCB circuit can be created to maintain exact temp, thus getting maximum reliabilty and MTBF. There are many other basic issues including straight out stability of drivers for mission critical equipment, don't go for the newest gaming gear. recommended would be: -DEC tulip based ethernet cards -permidia based video cards (Diamond still make -the Fire GL series which are a hard core Open Gl card) as I recall Metro X windows has support -Mylex scsi controllers -original Intel motherboards not just chipsets -nothing wrong with dvd's or ls120's after all they are fully backwards compatible. -basic sound blaster 16 if it can be still sourced -mitsubishi diamondtron 21" is the best and the new super flat model is beautiful + I have installed over 100+ and only had 1!!! break down in 2 years. ------------------------------------------------ by the way I don't believe Shawn represents who he says he does - not even the US army would start a procurment process like this!
Donald Becker does most of the work on network drivers. His most of his drivers that are optimized and tested for use in Beowulf systems (high speed continuous data on network) are the tulip based (DEC21x4x I think it is) network cards and a few others. 3com however is one of the LEAST tested and has had MANY problems in the past, and in my experience still works shitty. Try an SMC Etherpower I or Kingston or another Tulip based card. I have as a matter of personal experience had good luck and SMC Etherpower II. The once most tested seem to be
The task this machine seems to be built for sounds like it's going to be heavily Floating Point intensive (just my take ... sounds like data sampling through measurement ==> Floating Point). In this case use an Alpha 21264 if possible ... they really kick ass in FP. (This one is for double precision ... if you can live with single precision and you can do your own optimizations on it consider using the SIMD units of consumer processors (Intel SSE, AMD 3DNow!, Apple "Velocity engine"). If you are forced to use x86 because of compatibility with some non-alpha-ported software you might consider an Athlon (really strong in FP but (currently) lacking multi-processor support) or P3-550 Xeons (mucho cache but lacking MegaHertz - depends on the memory access pattern whether they are better) ==> do some research on the needs of your software ... there is no such thing as the "fastest x86-processor in EVERY aspect" -- each one of them has advantages and downfalls (sidenote: if you are using non-multithreadable code with VERY much branches and NO FP and your blocksize is 256K with the size of the loop-code that does the data-processing = 32K then K6-III is best for you). Speaking of Memory access patterns ... Rambus is only worth its cost (use PC133 Ram otherwise) when you need really high bandwidth (judging from the task-description this is the case ... but what do i know ... be more specific :-) ). Using Rambus on x86 (esp in these amounts you need) locks you into i840 mobos and P3s ... but again .. when you are able to choose architecture use alpha (21264 uses rambus afaik). If the task is gaining much from SMP (>70% when going from 1 to 2 CPUs) then use 4 processors (again: preferrably 21264s ... or if the data exchange between threads is low but each thread needs high memory bandwidth a beowulf cluster might work around memory bus saturation). On the size of RAM ... your own description says " up to or in excess of 1GB" ... so go for >1GB (Murphy's Law: Software always needs at least 1 MB more RAM than your machine has :-) ). But OTOH the cost of RAMBUS might make the price go back to SGI Octane levels you want to avoid (hehe) and perhaps 2 GB of PC100 RAM is both cheaper and faster than 1GB of Rambus ... What do you need these V770 Vipers for ?? Probably the money is better spent elsewhere .... and if you do heavy-texturized Graphicaloutput of your dataprocessing use a GeForce .... (or one of those expensive professional 3D-cards). Other issues i can think of ... OS: there are others than RedHat but there are no REAL diiferences in the distros that would make one or the other better in this aspect ... soundcard: something plain old would do the job (if it runs in Linux that is) but you probably want to get rid of ISA ... so no real complaint). P.S: after writing this i noted that there is just not enough disclosure on what your program does ... Integer stuff or (single precision? double?) FP ... does it benefit from large caches and/or SMP ... is microprocessor architecture a choice a not ... the only thing i am certain of is need for memory bandwidth (==> Rambus ==> Coppermine or Alpha). P.P.S: Alpha rulezz :-))) (but beware of non-ported software (especially proprietary one))
And no, I am not "proud of my country", how should I? I haven't built it, it was already there when I was born.
Hate to break it to you, but the coppermine cpu's are faster.
Why limit yourself to linux? I see nothing linux specific about those requirements.
A 5000 user ftp site running linux on a single box. Well? Ah, whats that you say? Its slow? Thats not the box or OS, its limited by their T3 connection.
Currently I am working with a company called Belobox Networks to port their high reliability network to have Linux support. These network are designed to be used in military situations where then network needs to keep running correctly even if parts of the network are physically damanged. I don't know all of the specifics of the network, but they currently run on PowerPC machines with a VME backplane bus, and are installed on some military cruisers. Currently most installations are using AIX, but they are wanting to start supporting Linux.
Stay tuned to that.
I've had NOTHING but troubles with the PCI128 sound card. Perhaps it was my choice of PCI slot, but from day 1 I never got it to work 'quite' right.
Go with the SBLive! Value instead. Similar price, better card.
der dee der.
But if you didn't like it, beware of Active Directory and just head on over to NDS!
Although the new I/O sub-system will probably not be available in time for this high end workstation, it would be prudent to speak with the folks at www.infinibandta.org or one of their sponsors' federal sys div. It would be prudent to only use I2O enabled I/O devices/cards so that the machine is not obsolete by end 2000.
The NT vs USS Yorktown incident have been revised:
6 .htm
http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/november9/
(Seems like M$ have friends in high places)
Suggested Changes to your Setup
Instead of Integrated dual ATA-66 EIDE controllers, recommend the using the Promise FastTrak66 IDE RAID Controller which lowers cost substantially at no penalty for a workstation setup.
Storage
Four 40 Gigabyte EIDE-66 Drives (dirt cheap and allows for plenty of diskspace which usually ends up being a huge plus!)
OS
Red Hat Linux 6.x
Use Mandrake instead, especially if you're going not going to recompile the Red Hat code yourself as Red Hat compiles everything as i386.
I guess the real question that needs to be asked first is WHEN you intend to purchase these systems? If you are aiming at using cutting edge technology but don't intend to roll out for 6 months, these systems will be old hat by the time you get them out the door.
Things to note:
If you are doing lots of data collection, make sure that you use decent spec drives and controllers, and that where you collect your data is on a totally seperate controller or channel from the main system drive(s). I'd look at a RAID controller (64 Bit PCI?) to provide a RAID striped solution to reduce disk rotational latency (not to improve data protection) and using a few smaller, faster disks. Don't use too many disks to allow for future expansion while maintaining speed. The idea is to dump the data to the drive as fast as possible. Look at the Alphas and their 64 bit PCI buses. (This is also apparently going to appear in the Athlons, so keep an eye on that). There are also Intel's that have 64 bit PCI buses, though they are no where near as common, and I have no idea how well they are supported under Linux.
Dual/Multi-CPU Athlons are round the corner. They will have much more bang for the buck than Multi-CPU Intels, especially with FPU bound applications. Also remember that while the Intel CPU's all SHARE the FSB, the Athlons each have a dedicated path from chipset to CPU, which could avoid a very problematic bottleneck if you are doing lots of data crunching. Note: I'd also wait for the Athlon's with Integrated Cache on-chip, as this will drastically improve performance with large amounts of data.
If you're looking at using OpenGL to render data visually (which is what I assume you've been doing on the SGI's), then I'd suggest to wait for XFree 4.0 which is also "just around the corner". The TNT2 Chip from Riva is very well supported, and is definately up there in the performance stakes. It is also not swamped with problems like the G-Force (NV10). You might also look at hardware OpenGL cards, as there are a number that are supported under Linux.
If you are using sound a lot, (eg: for audio data capture) then you will want to talk to the people who wrote the drivers, or at least Alan Cox. Figure out what card provides the services you need with the least CPU cycles. Go with this, don't go with something generic simply because it's cheap. Weigh up the differences. Also beware of older SB PCI-128's, as there is a lot of stock out there that are rebadged Ensonique's (who Creative bought, and effectively designed the PCI-128) that can cause problems. I've also noticed that SB PCI-128's have a large failure rate (my work PC here has one that just makes burbling sounds instead of music).
Whatever you do, if you are aiming at cutting edge, get an idea of your time frame, and work to what will be available then. Trim the edges, but don't trim too much, particularly if you want systems that will perform exceedingly well in the future, and remain upgradable. This is the mistake I see every government department make around the world. They change something they believe isn't as important, and by changing one small part in the system, they effectively cripple the system performance.
Either way, good luck!
By investing in Linux, the government would be endorsing an anti-business political agenda without the electorate's consent. Use BSD, which was developed at taxpayer expense and is business-friendly.
so i wonder why the army would need a dvd player. unless they decided to store this stuff on dvd, but i would assume a dvd writer would be need as well as a drive to read the discs....
if they were gonna back their info up, me thinks a tape drive may be more economical. one of those DLT tapes can store as much as 40 gig native with a upto 6MB/s xfer rate.
and in reference to why the army may need a soundcard, well if they are recording the stuff that goes through the communications systems or using it for "surveilance", a sound system may help.
you can also use sound to analyze the types of jets, guns, or missiles have been used, that is if you got a recording of it with your uber-cool spy plane!
in regards to a good case, i gots me a supermicro 750a full tower. now that hunk of steel rox!!! there are about 10-12 different places for cooling fans, many bays, as well as deburred edges. you can even remove the panels one at a time (i hate those damn U type covers)
That does limit your hardware selection quite a bit if you really need the main memory. I almost hate to say it but if your stuck on Intel look at a Xeon or at least a GX based board. You will have to question how good the Linux support for any of the new chip sets is when doing large memory.
Beyond that be prepared for a performance failure the SGI hardware is 64 bit I believe. Even if I'm wrong about that the INTEL stuff just does not compete well against workstation when doing FPU work.
I would strongly suggest looking at either Alpha of PowerPC hardware. The Alpha hardware will give you the best performance overall. The PowerPC G4 however can blow everything out of the water if you can make use of the AltVec unit. You acn also get relatively low cost Quad PPC boards that are optimized for DSP or data reduction work, these type of boards are either VME or CompactPCI
Do you know where your bottlenecks currently are? Perhaps a set of identical boxes is not an ideal match to your total processing requirements (though it certainly is nice to standardize). E.g., extracting data from special gear into more normal databases vs using the data with some visualization packages.
What part of what you are currently running is COTS and what is homebrew and what is contractor-brew? Have you identified what will and will not port easily? Any specific h/w compatibility lockins?
I would assess the porting problem carefully. And validation of the ported software. Set up canned tests taken from real data to make sure new systems duplicate results from the old. You may find interesting differences in libraries etc. if you chase down those last-decimal-point differences. Maybe even bugs ;-)
Of course the military has all sorts of cheap slaves to throw at this, so the hardware savings should really stand out over labor costs ;-)
I hope this doesn't discourage you from the move, though.
They are waiting for the AMD 760 chipset which, according to AMDZone are supposed to be released in 1Q'00:
New Athlon Chipsets Q1-Jeff Tom 11:50 p.m. CST
JC has heard from a source that dual and quad Athlon chipsets will be available in Q1 of 2000, contrary to other reports.
According to Chris Hare's chipset chart the 760 will support DDR RAM, although I thought I read somewhere else that DDR wouldn't be supported until 2nd half of 2000.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
From an oft ignored document detailing the duties of Congress:
15. To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions:
What part of "repel invasions" don't you understand?
I remember a New York Times article about the "weird world of open source" which talked about the fact that the Navy was using OpenBSD (and making their own modifications), and the point that it was an OS distributed from Canada, containing security code written by an Italian programmer with contributions from a Russian, and how it open source software broke dowon a lot of the traiditional trust problems because you can look at it yourself.
Doh.
Seriously, I have known people that squeezed extra performance out of certain types of parallel calculations by having them done on the video-card. That facility was supposed to be there for preparing a new screen while the old was still displayed, but video cards are better suited to massively parallel calculations than standard CPUs are...
So data processing might indeed benefit from having lots of video memory, even if you are not displaying anything.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
(probably not spelling right)
Dude!!! Nicely put!!!
email jason.salopek@usa.net
we must talk
WELL THE US MILITARY PROBABLY DECIDED TO GO WITH NT OR SOMETHING ELSE THANKS TO ALL YOU LEFT WING MORONS WHO WHINED ABOUT THE MILITARY INSTEAD OF USING THIS OPPORTUNITY TO PUSH LINUX. I REALLY HOPE Y2K HITS HARDS SO YOU STUPID MORONS ARE KNOCKED OUT ON YOUR ASS, IF THAT HAPPENS TO ME, SO BE IT SO I CAN WATCH YOU BURN. I AM SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING ABANDONING LINUX FOR WIN2K, cause it's better ? HELL NO! CAUSE I AM SO SICK OF MORONS IN THE LINUX COMMUNITY THAT I HAVE JUST ABOUT HAD IT. SAD CAUSE I HAVE BEEN ONE OF THE MOST LOYAL LINUX USERS FOR ALMOST 5 YRS AND HELD THRU ROUGH TIMES AND GETTING MY HEAD CHEWED OFF AT WORK WHEN LINUX WAS IN IT'S EARLY STAGES AND FOULED UP STUDENT'S EMAIL. LISTENING TO YOU GUYS AND I AM ALMOST SORRY I WASTED ALL THOSE LATE NIGHTS AND OVERNIGHTS AT WORK. jason.salopek@usa.net
Let's see... Spec for IDE and not use it. Yup military! Please, get someone that is a real systems engineer put together the mil-spec for the system. Not someone that is a wrench jocky. NOTE: this is more than likely a fake or troll post. the Military does NOT just go out and purchase things to save money. there are very STRICT Military specifications that cannot be deviated from and 99.99% of all pc manufacturers cannot and will not meet. Why do you thing they have $2000.00 wrenches and $300.00 toilet seats? "Dave, download that flight data..." , "Ok, sir.... dang it this pc crashed again" " That's ok, it's not like we are doing life and death things here!" Sorry, but this "request" is as fake as the sincere smile on Clintons face.
Oops sorry, i duidnt notice you were an AOL'er. I apologize for thinking you had a brain.
Affordable storage and DLT mentioned in the same breath. have you EVER priced a DLT drive? $3000.00 for a cheap one! and the tapes are $100.00 each when purchased in bulk of lots of 20 or more. DLT doesnt equal affordable.... DLT equals reliable storage for the rich.
I've done some work for the US Navy at a reserve base. I swear that I've never seen so many Linux geeks in one place before. They were running most of the base's systems on Linux, excpet for (strangely) the WinNT ID card system that's down 90% of the time. I spent most of the time there discussing Linux/*BSD, instead of doing any actual work. Heh.
Sean Robertson
[http://www.penguincomputing.com/niveus-scsi.html
System price: $10,475
Now some comments: Rambus is bad stuff. i840 too.
The best thing to do would be to wait a couple of months so you can get Dual Athlon 800 systems for the same price with PC133 or faster SDRAM.
-- d'arcy poirot
DVD drives are cheap. Assuming that these systems are going to be around for a few years, it would be cheaper to buy them with DVD drives now instead of buying them with CD-ROM drives and upgrading them to DVD later. Ignoring DVD video, DVD disks with computer data will be more common in the future. Microsoft is offering MSDN on DVD.
Hi Flinn (sorry, I don't know your rank), umlike your unit, these guys don't have to worry about upgrading from Windows NT. Since they're already using UNIX, migrating to Linux probably won't cause the problems or training issues you mentioned.
Other than that, about the only thing major I would do differently is I'd seriously consider AMD CPU's.
And there won't be anything you can do about it,
assuming you can even detect it.
Microcode hacks are worse than GPL0 virii.
Of course, almost no one knows about GPL0 virii
(and no - I'm not talking about hacking the kernel.
If you don't know what I'm talking about - it's
your second worse nightmare. Count you blessings
that the script kiddies can't understand it).
You know - nearly undetectable, and almost nothing
you can do about them.
If you can't understand what to do with ucode
access, this is a sign of your own lack of
imagination. Not mine. Nor others.
My first thought is that I can dream of twice the box for 1/2 the money. Not that the specs listed would not be competitive with your average fare proffered by Dell and the like for several grand. Rambus is bleeding edge, overpriced, and underperforms...haven't you been reading PCWeek lately? 1 Gig of RAM is overkill, and without including SMP, a waste. It would be great for a Solaris server running one of Microsoft's websites perhaps. At least make it 1 gig of reasonably priced RAM (i.e. PC133.) Now with 4 processors, a gig may make sense. Remember your system is only as good as your weakest link, overkill on RAM will not speed up a single bogged down processor. I would put money that my dual Pentium Pros@233 would keep up with any single Intel chip when at the upper limits of processor stress. A single 100 MHz NIC would be another weak link if not running at full duplex at least (assuming there is some sort of heavy file transfers going on.) Think trunked NICs plugged into a switch that supports it. Those 3COM switches do that sort of thing. A 36 gig hardrive sounds like a cesspool of latency. RAID, redundant array of inexpensive disks, fits the bill for a cheap PC here, put that extra money into a hardcore raid controller. I agree with everyone else that a G200 and a SB16 would be more than adequate for those respective duties. USB? Why? DVD? Why?? Just my free opinion.
All you need to do is to cause an internal CPU reset. This is trivial, and has been ever since Intel put an MMU on the CPU (with the 286). Once the CPU resets, you are in real mode. Of course, there are a few minor details that you have to take care of. But heck - believe it or not, there have been actual successful products made using this trick.
You might try the newer Microsoft mouse that uses a light beam rather than a wheel. Those have been seen to be a slower response, but let's face it, the Army doesn't want to have to clean one more thing out. Perhaps a RAID device is in order, and I would dump the PCI128. Go ahead and get a Live! Value. It will give you less processor ping for your buck.
I've had good luck with the 3C905B's, but the C models have been a pain. Since the C model is out, I'm sure it'll be harder to get the B's as time goes on.
Go for the Intel NIC's. They work beautifully.
CPU/mobo/RAM: I like AMD for the dollar value, and if the performance gain by RAMBUS RAM isn't huge (which apparently some /.er's think is the case) you'll save a buttload of cash.
Soundcard: Even though a couple people disagree, a PCI sound card is probably going to be better for you than ISA even you aren't doing insane sound things with it.
Orcslicer
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
Just because you don't know how to access a box which isn't on the net, doesn't mean it can't be done. Put up enough money, and it will be done. As far as the silly statement about microcode always being insecure - you've got to be kidding. Please show us how to change the microcode on the 8086, 80286, 80386 and the 80486. Hello? Hello? ROFLMAO
It would be a good idea to consider the AMD Athlon platform for these systems. I say this because of the much higher (200Mhz) external bandwidth and better bus handling. This allows for faster multi-CPU support and better processing speeds for large data objects in RAM (as opposed to the slower i840 bus and memory support).
As the Army is not simply pushing large amounts of memory around (such as for DVD or 3D gaming textures), but rather dealing with huge numbers of pieces of RAM, PC-133 (and its decendants) provide much better access times than RAMBUS does.
The Athlon's use of Digital's (now Compaq's) EV6 bus is a huge step in the right direction for processing large amounts of data and sharing that data between processors, memory and PCI cards.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Why not the dual G4 motherboard RioREd by silicon fruit? I thought it was really cool when I saw it. Standard PC components (i think) and runs FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, or BeOS. my 2cents.
You have a very nice shopping list, but where are the specifications ? How many frames of video per second, at what resolution, what color depth? What is the size of the samples, are they uniformly sized? How long do the samples need to be kept on-line ? Do the collected sample have to be processed in real-time ? What is the environment: electrical, humidity, temperature, rfi/emi ? Will you need filtered inlets ? membrane covered keyboards ?
I think this is great, I've been pushing my unit to move to Linux for field operations, and while they're letting me 'test' it for our uses, I haven't recieved alot of support. Personally I'm a Caldera fan, I don't care for RedHat at all. My only recommendation is to switch to Caldera's distrubution. Once again, personally I feel it is more 'professional' than Redhat, and from my own experience, a better overall product.
This is a game, in that attacker and defender both can construct decision trees for analysis, and treat this as a minimax problem in order to establish the most fruitful attacks and defenses.
I suppose it's difficult to be certain without running through the minimax problem, but I don't think that "vulnerability to rewriting microcode" will rank terribly high on the list.
After all, it's likely that reprogramming microcode represents something that you'd have to be in supervisor mode to do, e.g. having your code running in Ring 0.
The thing is, once the attacker's code is there in Ring 0, they've already won.
Being in Ring 0 (or an equivalent thereof) means that your process can do practically anything.
I think that's enough of an analytical result right there to establish that a "microcode attack" isn't going to be terribly feasible, as it's an attack that implies that security has already been fairly irretrievably breached.
Consider making this concrete on Linux.
If IA-64 allows user mode ( e.g. "Ring higher than 0") code to hit on the microcode engine that controls what happens in supervisor mode, THIS IS INDEED A SPECTACULAR BREACH. I can't believe that Intel could possibly be that stupid. IA-32 may be a very ugly hacked up design for many reasons; it is not a stupid design in that way.
If, on the other hand, only code in "Ring 0," e.g. kernel code, can modify microcode, then this is no worse an issue than the issues we already have with the need to trust and secure the code that runs in the kernel.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Here's what I'd advise that you buy For the motherboard You simply aren't going to find a board that will support that much RAM bus memory (RIMM Slots). The prices are enough that it would start to approach the SGI... I would heavily recommend going with the PC133. You can spend the saved money on better quality components. Supermicro Super PIIIDM6 http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/840 /PIIIDM6.htm For the 9 GB hard drive: Quantum Atlas IV For the 36 GB hard drive: Quantum Atlas 10K As for the sound and DVD, I wonder if you are using these for re-enactments. If so, the Soundblaster should be fine. I don't see any reason for the DVD though. I find it extremely unlikely that you are wanting to record data on DVD. And for all intents and purposes you would have to buy a dedicated industrial grade recorder if you did. The only reason I can think of to buy DVD is for training films. So I would go with a good high quality SCSI CD-ROM instead. I would recomend the Logitech Mouse Man Wheel. It is much more ergonomical, has better quality and better support. I just don't see Microsoft offering Linux support on their mouse. Your going to have a lot of heat with the fast spinning hard drives and dual processor arrangement. I would recommend that you install more as many case fans as you can physically fit. I would recommend a RAID controller for speed and redundancy for control. A good controller that will support the SCSI 160 is the Mylex extreme raid 2000. I don't think that you can find a SCSI 160 card that will work on a standard 32 bit PCI slot. I don't know of any motherboard out there that would meet the rest of your requirements and has 64 bit pci slots. I would wait a month or so and see if something comes out in that area.
am i the only person here how thinks that story is just plain stupid? just how bad a design is it that allows a single point of failure to disable the entire ship? speaking as one of those people who's pager goes off at 3AM everytime Solaris takes a dump or Netscrape forgets how to restart after it rotates a log file, i can tell you that any fool who designs a system like had better be looking for a new job. this ain't a OS problem. it's a system design problem. no OS has 100% uptime. if lives count on it, you had better have redundancy and you had better be able to run at reduced capacity until the system gets put back together.
if they are going to shell out the cash for the SCSI drives they say they may as well do dual alphas. and the speed is much improved.
With all root compromises, it's possible (in theory) to detect the compromise.
Even with a GPL0 virus, it's possible (though difficult, and it would require a bus analyzer, if the attack was done properly).
Not so with a microcode compromise, unless you have the ability to verify the integrety of the microcode. If you do, would you please mind sharing it with the rest of the world? :)
That's the problem with a microcode attack. It's buried; you can't detect it, and the only way to eliminate it is to replace the chip (unless Intel tells us how).
Perhaps now you can see the appeal of such an attack. It is an INCREDIBLY appealing target.
So it's not just a matter of the cost involved; it's a matter of the resulting benefit. I submit that having undetectable control of a CPU at your whim is a great big benefit.
I also note that you do NOT need root access for this. If you can attack the boot sector, you're in like Flynn.
Now, put yourself in the position of any other government (say the Chinese). How do you know that the NSA hasn't put in their own backdoor? Quite frankly, the NSA would have to be incredibly stupid to miss such an opportunity.
Now put yourself in the position of a U.S. Government entity. If such a backdoor exists, how you do you know that it hasn't been compromised by a foreign government?
You can't tell, unless perhaps you are deemed important enough to know.
I also note that there are indeed Government bids out there where the modifiable microcode is an issue. At least some take this seriously.
You may not use this software if your organization's sole purpose is to kill people. Sounds worthwile to me.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
To Whom It May Concern:
;-)
;-)
This post comes late in this discussion, and as such I have no guarantees that you'll end up seeing this message. However, your group has made a decidedly honorable request to Slashdot, so I'll take my chances and provide you with some commentary on your acquisition plan:
Motherboard:
Intel® 840 chipset
Integrated dual ATA-66 EIDE controllers
You're dooming yourself to, at best! Abit motherboards. It's tragic, but while Abit motherboards make for excellent gaming machines, they're simply not of Asus caliber. I'm dead serious: Recently, my friends and I spent upwards of 50 hours combined trying to get Linux to work with an Asus BH6 and a large Maxtor UDMA-66 drive. The number of incompatibilies and instabilities I encountered was pretty much the worst experience I've had with off the shelf stuff, bar none.
The Asus just worked, and has been rock solid for me ever since.
In any system you build, reliability is far more important than speed, and if you poke around you'll find far, far, far fewer horror stories referencing Asus motherboards than any other brand. The reason is simple--if they can't do a technology right, they won't do it at all. Asus has not yet released a motherboard with integrated UDMA-66 for this reason, and they're pretty much the hardware company I respect the most because of it.
If Asus hasn't released a RIMM supporting Mobo(they may have, I don't know), there's a reason.
CPUwise, has Asus given in on releasing a K7 mobo yet? Last I checked, Intel was playing off people like me who won't get a motherboard unless Asus makes it by threatening Asus with extreme price increases if they supported AMD's chips. Nasty stuff.
You should specify UDMA-66 expansion cards, and leave 'em empty.
SCSI:
Integrated Ultra 160/M SCSI and Ultra/Wide SCSI Controllers
9GB Ultra 160/M SCSI (7200 rpm) hard drive (internal)
36GB (or larger) Ultra 160/M SCSI (10000 rpm) hard drive (internal)
SCSI on the motherboard is unnecessary, and you're risking greater downtime through the loss of replaceable components. A spurious shock through the SCSI line can (rarely, but possibly) short out your SCSI bus. Replacing a card is a hell of alot less downtime than replacing the system's motherboard!
Furthermore, it sounds like you plan to store quite a bit of content on this machine--I'd be interested in your design justifications for two, drastically different sized hard drives. Considering the amount of storage you're planning to use, I'm wondering if you shouldn't spec out using Hardware RAID-5 w/ three 36GB drives. That would give you much more aggregate transfer speed, as well as hot-swappable reliability(you'd be able to lose any single drive yet not lose a byte of data). While I understand RAID-5 is much more of a server technology than one you'd expect on a workstation, your workstation has been spec'd with server level design considerations and I can't imagine why the storage solution should be any less professional.
With regards to the controller, I'd normally suggest a solution based upon Adaptec's generally excellent hardware, but Mylex's eXtremeRAID 2000 looks like it'd fit your needs quite nicely, and has company-supported Linux drivers.
Diskwise, I've heard good things about IBM(who invented GMR, the technique a good chunk of the industry depends on for the kind of high density platters we know and love) and Seagate. I'd at minimum specify a range of brands you'd accept for the hard drive--remember, moving parts = more likely to die.
Networking:
3Com 3C905B-TX ethernet card (PCI)
(Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, but this advice long predates my employment there.)
Get a Tulip(DEC 21440 or Compaq-Purchase Remarked Equivalent) based card. Yes, they're inexpensive, but Beowulf code was originally developed on Tulip equipped clusters of machines. As such, Don Becker has optimized their drivers to an absolutely ridiculous degree, and there are several kernel networking settings that are just not easily available for any other architecture. (I believe the Intel cards have some of the fast routing code ported to them.)
In general, Tulips are pretty much the network cards to standardize on, no matter what your operating system.
Multimedia:
Diamond Viper V770 Ultra 32 (AGP 2X/4X)
SoundBlaster PCI128 (PCI)
Powered speakers with wall adapter
Video's OK, I'd suggest something by Diamond based on nVidia's new GeForce256 processor with reservations that I haven't looked into their Linux 2D/3D performance yet. The GeForce256 is a specific model that's likely to end up very well supported, due to its extensive Christmas sales and ostensible inclusion in MS's coming X-Box. (3D Visualization hardware is now completely driven by gamers. Remember when gamers used to get the sims from the Army?
Sound: Go SB-Live. The Linux drivers for it are excellently stable, the card has digital I/O, and the chipset is likely to become an immensely powerful programmable DSP in the near future. The card also has an excellent noise floor--a striking improvement over the rest of the historically noisy Sound Blaster line.
Specify the four point cambridge soundworks speakers, if you can. One thing you forgot is a microphone! You need one short range, noise/echo cancelling, unidirectional mic that gets mounted on the monitor. You need one long range "speakerphone" omnidirectional mic for conference-over-IP sessions. Both mikes(and probably all sound in general) need to be hooked through an A/V box that defaults to physically separating the microphones from the mic port on the sound card. It's great to be able to use data links as emergency/impromptu voice channels, but you don't want an adversary to use your computer as a listening post!
300W or greater power supply
Ah, power. Hot-swappable power? Not inconceivable, though we're starting to really push the separation between Workstationa and Server with one of those
Specify a UPS for this machine, preferably one of those "Brick Walls" that can survive direct lightning strikes without sacrificial elements.
Portable Storage:
LS-120 internal superfloppy (IDE)
5X (or faster) DVD drive (internal - IDE or SCSI)
The LS-120's are nice if your organization has standardized on them, but that's about it.
Specify a SCSI DVD drive, simply because you'll weed out the "consumers won't need this more the six months" fly by night hardware makers that only work in IDE. Plus, the CPU load of doing anything in IDE is ridiculous--I did a move from one large IDE drive to another...2.5MB/s, 75% CPU on Celeron 450. Ouch.
Another main advantage of a SCSI drive is that it lends itself well to integration with a SCSI CD-Burner. Don't discount these--there's just literally nothing at all better for moving 2 to 650 megs of data from one machine to another, particularly for emergency drop ships. (I built our groupware CD burning page at work for precisely this reason.) I highly suggest the Yamaha 8x SCSI-3 burner--I just bought one, and much like the Asus, it Just Worked.
Even if your system is prebuilt for you, parts that "Just Work" contribute significantly to the long term life of the system as a whole.
Keyboard:
Soft-touch keyboard (no keyclick)
Specify the Microsoft Intellikey Pro, *NON ELITE*(with the god awful diamond star arrows). Technically, the thing is actually pretty nice, particularly with its feel, but RSI injuries are real and 2000 is pretty much going to be the year of Lawyers vs. Engineers. This is one less thing for you to worry about.
Warranty: 3 year parts and labor
No long term support contract on the operating system? (RH6.x? You might want to replace this with 'Red Hat Linux, Present Revision') I understand why you'd want this--either your in house talent is that good, or you don't want to be stuck with the random low bid being your support provider too. I'd personally vouch for VA Linux as a provider of enterprise level support--stock price aside, these guys know their stuff. IBM and Linuxcare(who doesn't sell machines, but provides top notch 24x7 support) are also good companies.
Other stuff you didn't mention
Modem: Don't try to depend on everything always being up. In a pinch, you need to be able to interact with analog(radio?) communication lines. Definitely v.90, and if it's internal, it must be a full com port implementation. Internal is preferable(nothing to lose), but it'll be harder to find one that isn't a Winmodem. Do not trust the Winmodem drivers for Linux--see the SB Live driver, before they opened it.
TV Adapter--you may need to output to video for presentations or whatnot. This is entirely dependant on your needs.
Temperature--heat sensors are a very, very good thing.
I hope this content was useful. All I ask in return is that if you end up reading this, you notify me so I know I didn't waste my time picking through your acquisition request(which was overall quite good!).
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
One thing I've found with the larger hard drives is, they put out a goodly amount of heat. And of course, the Pentium is no slouch at cooking plastic if given half a chance.
Well, it WAS the case that they had no way to access the K7M info. I just checked the search engine, and now it's findable. I guess they decided they weren't fooling anyone and decided to be up-front about it.
who are you going to kill with these computers, you bastards ?
Army, from whatever country, will never get the sligthest cooperation from me.
He quotes using 2 CPU's in the system, and currently there are no motherboards out that support this.
(I don't even think they have a chipset for it yet)
so basically any intel system will outperform K7 because you can just use more CPU's
I see a lot of posts here saying that the K7 athlon would be a better choice, but the fact is that you can build an intel system that outperforms a amd athlon system almost 2 to 1.
Athlon motherboards currently do NOT support SMP (more than 1 cpu on the motherboard).
And the spec sheet clearly specifies "CPUs (2)".
The amd athlon is at 700Mhz right now, and intels run at 733, and at these speeds such an atlon cannot be much more that 5% or 10% faster than the intel.
Obviously 2 intel cpu's will outperform any athlon system in such a case.
Without knowing much about the intended use for this machine it's difficult to say what problems lie in store when you switch from the Octane, however it looks capable. The only serious and obvious problem I see is the graphics card.
If you've been using an Octane it is more than likely that you have been deploying some kind of OpenGL graphics application on that system. I'd hate to see you get egg on your face even though you are switching from an SGI system so; make sure that you can get hardware accelerated OpenGL on the graphics card you use. You have some choices there, with commercially available X servers which support GLX or Mesa based hardware acceleration in Xfree86, things are progressing rapidly on the GLX/OpenGL acceleration front, just make sure you have a plan in place to get acceleration which is compatible with your hardware, unfortunately this doesn't work out of the box yet, so you'll have to play with X servers, drivers and Mesa, depending on your card & approach.
You can always switch the card so it may make sense to get your initial development systems and remain flexible about the graphics cards. See what works best for your applications during the port then finalize on that card and driver setup. By the time you deploy you can be sure the driver situation will have improved immensely so a graphics card final selection before fielding the solution would probably be appropriate, and you only have to swap out the card in your development systems which will be a relatively small portion of the system cost on a small number of systems.
- A.P.
--
"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?"
I'd avoid RIMM memory until it's been proven better over time. If that means using the VIA chipset to run 133 MHz FSB for now, so be it. Or you could use an Athlon, or stick to the tried-and-true BX chipset. But regardless, I'd stick with SDRAM for the next six months or so at least (a year, ideally) - the cost is substantially less, the performance is virtually identical, and it's proven stable. Rambus has had issues so far - the fix for the initial problems with the early i820 chipsets was to eliminate a RIMM slot! That doesn't encourage an early adoption.
Other than that, the specs look good. You may want to look into 3D cards that are optimized for general-purpose 3D rather than gaming, but it'll be fast any way you slice it. As for 128-bit sound, it's not needed, but given how little a good 128-bit sound card costs, why not?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
It's also 8 bits wide instead of 64. Any wonder why the clock speed's 8 times as fast as PC100?
What a scam.
- A.P.
--
"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?"
Instead of an Ergo keyboard I recomend one with a click.. a sound feel to key keyboard where you really get the feel that your typing.
I've heard far to many complaints about ergo units.. including complaints of CAUSING the problems they are designed to prevent...
I also suggest trainning typists on old fasionned typowiters not on computer keyboards.. just find an old unit with a selectric style layout [this is what IBM used on the original PCs and todays PC keyboards are still selectric based].. saves on tranning units and the PC keyboards let you put your hand down slowing your typing speed a great deal.. Learning on a typowriter teaches out this behavure by not giving the typest a place to rest.. This way if the typest dose rest his/her hands it's out of fatige and rest has become nessisary to continued productivity...
Also a wrist rest at the edge of the keyboard is a good thing... it gives the typest a soft place to put his/her hands.
I don't actually exist.
I am a network administrator at a Tier 1 supplier for the major car companies and I will attest to the fact that the 3Com 905TX-B 10/100 card, as well as it may perform well at all in an office environment, does not perform in a production environment, or any environment with any amount of interference for that matter. We use the 3C905TX-B card in our office PCs but on the production floor, we've stepped down to the 3Com 905TX. Since the 3Com 905TX cards are no longer available, we've recently started using Intel EtherExpress Pro's with great success! They have been able to perform to specifications even under heavy bombardment from the large UV ovens in our plant. After talking with a few 3Com representatives, I have learned that the 3C905TX-B does have problems with interference but 3Com will not be addressing these issues. You'll have to take me at my word on that since 3Com wasn't too eager to put that in writing for me. Adam
People...GET AN ATHLON in there. Its proven...the Athlon can do heavier CPU work in less time. And you Intel freaks...lay off, dont crap your pants and yell at me because you know the truth. Athlons own the PIII Coppermine
I'm not sure he's thinking about Beowulfs; but then, he may not be aware of them - which is partly why he decided to ask /.
Um, the spec looks pretty good, but maybe you might want to consider: SSA over SCSI - IBM makes a good controller, there's linux support, and SSA is a good performer (drives are in a loop that can be accessed from two 'directions') - we use SSA where I work to host some decent-sized (18GB) DB2 database, and it's much faster than the scsi we were using (ultra 2 wide). it may also be more cost-effective to use a general-purpose cluster of lower performance machines to provide the computing horsepower you need. we use mosix, and it works pretty good for most things (not for everything, though). http://www.cnds.jhu.edu/mirrors/mosix/ hth
Might I suggest, for the video card, checking out LeadTek? They make some truly gawdawesome video cards that are specifically designed for applications performance (OpenGL, etc.) instead of gaming. I've been very happy with my L2300, under both Windows NT and Linux. At the time you couldn't do much better for the dollar!
Sig broken, watch for
I can vouch for the speed of the Alpha 21264, as can anyone who uses it. Looking at Spec scores isn't enough--the 4MB L3 cache works wonders. I've seen 20-fold improvements on povray, rendering, clock for clock, that just can't be explained by superscalar differences. -Paul Komarek, away from home and his cookies
If you decide to go for an Alpha, I've had good luck with Microway. Aspen systems also seemed to be good in presales, anyway. -Paul Komarek
If you are considering multiple processors, you want to look carefully at the motherboard. Intel-based multiprocessors share the same memory and I/O busses. If you go with a nice dual Alpha 21264, you'll each processor will get a seperate I/O and memory bus, 128 bits wide. This is another part of the Alpha architecture's obsession with speed. -Paul Komarek
You're problem is probably your switch or cables, as you mentioned. I have Netgear fa310tx's in different machines, one Windows, one Linux (Redhat 6.0), and both are always 100bt to my switch.
Moo.
Please provide more info on these ``GPL0 virii'', I'm curious. Does ``GPL0'' refer to operation at ring 0 (like, in the kernel)?
I can quite see that you probably can do many things with the microcode, but what I'm saying is that it's much harder and on the whole far less efficient than using a backdoor in a network card. There's no question that you can do everything, but you are stuck to the neck in a Turing tar-pit.
And, in fact, no, you can't do anything you want. Another instance of this ``computation in hostile environment'' I've been ranting about in Slashdot these past few weeks: it would theoretically be quite possible to have the computer operate on encrypted data, without being able to learn anything useful from the manipulations, even if the OS and the microchip are in enemy hands. Naturally, the encryption and the decryption have to take place elsewhere.
Apart from that, it's all a question of deciding whom you trust, and of trusting Trust itself. The paranoid can even imagine a back door in the laws of physics itself (that some physicist discovers without telling anybody): grounds for a good science fiction, I guess. The compiler may have a back door, that you can't detect without reading the assembly code, that isn't present in the sources, but that inserts itself everytime you recompile the compiler. Maybe every C compiler in the world has such a back door: I don't think anyone ever had the patience of reading the entire assembly output of any C compiler — ever. Maybe it's at an even lower level: maybe the microchips all have a back door in them, and this back door is so subtle that whenever a new microchip is designed (by means of some computer, presumably), the back door in the computer that does the designing will add the back door to the computer being designed.
After all, that is what we are: a self-replicating back door on the surface of the Earth. It took evolution billions of years to design us, but maybe back doors in cyberspace evolve faster.
SGI's current Linux offerings are targeted at the server market, not the desktop. I'm not sure what the future holds though.
"Yeah well
Tell that to people who have no insurance. Then again, it has always been convenient to ignore the lower class throughout much of American history. If you don't have to look at them, the system must be working just fine, eh?
The idea is to improve: things should not always just be the same from generation to generation. The reason we would want to change the system is to build a better one. A system which in itself will be replaced by something else. Idealistic, sure. But it's good to try to replace an imperfect system with something that is better.
Oh, I forgot, you don't have one. Mea culpa.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
If you are really concerned about this, and in a military environment, particularly a potentially highly assaulted environment, I would get in touch with developers from both GNOME and KDE and question them about what network traffic their respective software responds to.
You can also contact the more "compact" window manager (well, GNOME really isn't a window manager, but it somewhat corresponds to KDE in this context in the same manner. Enlightenment or WindowMaker are Window Managers, and you can use both without GNOME, possibly aleviating any potential issues with networking) writers. AFAIK, BlackBox only has one developer, and a small code base, so it would be relatively easy to not only test it, but fix it.
(feel free to email if you have more questions)
I don't know what the Army's gonna use some of this stuff for (DVD??)
DVD is BIG. My employer has a dedicated DVD somewhere on the network permanently hosting a 10+ GB archive problems database that Microsoft provides. (Need a big db for MS problems?)
17 GB on a mass-printed medium versus 2/3 GB? It's a no-brainer. So long as the DVD is verified to read conventional CDR and CDRW. My own DVD is an early one that cannot read any CDR.
True...but the title of the post should have included their Unit, not just a general U.S. Army. I wish it were the entire U.S. Army that was looking for Linux help. PFC Mueller, Flinn Automations 40th Signal Battalion
Depending on what you need it for, I'd recommend avoiding the Diamond graphics card. I've used both a Diamond Viper 770 and an ASUS V3800TVR (both based on the TNT2 chip), and had much better luck with the ASUS. However, a friend used the very same V770 that caused me no end of problems and he has absolutely no problems with it. YMMV.
Also, you may wish to buy a small number of systems from a supplier to test and experiment with. Linux is a nice OS, but it may not be right for your applications - don't buy into an OS because it's popular, use the right tool for the job. Example: As much as I like Linux, Solaris is much better for the job I need to do at work.