From owner-freebsd-smp Tue Jun 24 18:40:25 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA21737 for smp-outgoing; Tue, 24 Jun 1997 18:40:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from squid.pdc.kth.se (squid.pdc.kth.se [130.237.221.65]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA21712 for ; Tue, 24 Jun 1997 18:40:14 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (tege@localhost) by squid.pdc.kth.se (8.8.5/8.6.9) with SMTP id DAA01747 for ; Wed, 25 Jun 1997 03:40:10 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <199706250140.DAA01747@squid.pdc.kth.se> X-Authentication-Warning: squid.pdc.kth.se: tege@localhost didn't use HELO protocol To: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Subject: New monster server Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 03:40:10 +0200 From: Torbjorn Granlund Sender: owner-smp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk My company intends to purchase a new compute and disk server early this fall. We originally intended to get an Alpha system, but it seems hard to get a reasonable OS without paying an outrageous amount of money. (NetBSD might be good enough for the alpha platform; but it doesn't seem to get a lot of usage.) The FreeBSD SMP work is very good news, since it may enable us to stay with FreeBSD while getting the machine power we need. (We currently run FreeBSD 2.2.1 or 2.2.2 on seven of our eight machines. The only non-FreeBSD machine is a Sun...) We would like the machine to have on the order of 25 SPECint95 (summing the SPECint95 on the individual CPUs in case we go for an SMP solution). So a single CPU 21164 won't do. A single cpu 21264 would do. A 4 CPU P6/200MHz/512KB would do. (It seems difficult to get 4 CPU P6 motherboards, since the Orion isn't made, and the 440BX is not yet available.) I'd be interessted in hearing your comments. Realistically, will I be able to get a 4 CPU FreeBSD system to work well enough this fall? If not, when do you think that could happen? I am willing to spend about $20000 for the hardware. It is highly unlikely that Digital will want to sell me a dual CPU 21164 or a single CPU 21264 for that amount money. Will a 4 CPU P6 be cheap enough and will it be stable enough to use for heavy load? Torbjorn