Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 15:53:27 +0200 From: Vincent Schut <schut@sarvision.nl> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: this 48-core box... Message-ID: <20130919155327.115e7344@sarvision.nl> References: <52388C9B.6030205@foxbatcapital.com>
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On Tue, 17 Sep 2013 12:08:43 -0500 Michael Chen <michael@foxbatcapital.com> wrote: > I'm considering bidding on this 48-core box: > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-A-Server-1042G-TF-1U-H8QG6-4-CPUS-48-cores-2-2Ghz-128GB-RAM-/151119828428?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item232f7195cc > > Does anyone have experience with it and can I use all the cores? > > Thanks! > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to > "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > I recently bought one like that (48 cores but 'only' 96 Gb ram). It was meant to play a double role as both zfs file server and data processing server (we do lots of satellite image processing), running FreeBSD 9.1. It connects with a SAN and we'll use it to process about 36TB of satellite data in the next months. (In a couple of weeks we will probably have budget to split those roles, and buy a dedicated file server.) After several weeks of tweaking and testing, I can say that: - the zfs/file server part runs without problems - the satellite data processing had problems scaling to all 48 cores, I got max performance when running about 18 processes in parallel, scaling up more would lower the overall performance. However, this (sorry guys) appeared to be a FreeBSD problem, and not a hardware problem. As a test I switched to linux with ZoL (ZFS on Linux), and, though zfs performance is less compared to freebsd, data processing is much much better, like a factor 12 or so. Conclusion: the hardware is alright, however when needed to do lots of heavy calculations on terabytes of data, the combination with FreeBSD appears not ideal. Of course it is you get what you pay for. Decent, OK working hardware, but none of the special handy-dandy features expensive brands will give you. If you don't need them, in my experience it is decent hardware for a good price. regards, Vincent.
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