Author Topic: Machines on steroids. (Read 6187 times)

Jaded · « **on:** 30 May, 2008, 02:22:59 pm »

I now have 12GB of RAM and 2.75TB of storage in my Mac Pro.

How long will that last me before I need to upgrade again?

bobajobrob · « **Reply #1 on:** 30 May, 2008, 02:29:50 pm »

That's insane. I have 2GB RAM and an 80 GB disk in my laptop and I find that ample. What are you doing that requires so much RAM? As for disk space, I suppose it depends how much pr0n you can download.

Jaded · « **Reply #2 on:** 30 May, 2008, 02:52:33 pm »

Running Photoshop side by side with a Windows Virtual machine with 2GB of RAM is quite hungry.

Shutting applications down because there isn't enough RAM when RAM is so cheap is not cost effective...

Several video projects are running at well over 60GB. Itunes library is 48GB. 105GB of Photos.

It all adds up!

andygates · « **Reply #3 on:** 30 May, 2008, 02:54:48 pm »

Should be good until, oh, November.

pcolbeck · « **Reply #4 on:** 30 May, 2008, 03:01:11 pm »

The 16th at 3:27pm to be precise.

bobajobrob · « **Reply #5 on:** 30 May, 2008, 03:14:59 pm »

You should upgrade now to 32 GB RAM just to be on the safe side

andygates · « **Reply #6 on:** 30 May, 2008, 03:25:25 pm »

Someone somewhere has a price/performance curve plotted out and will buy their gear based on that algorithm...

Jaded · « **Reply #7 on:** 30 May, 2008, 03:30:35 pm »

Quote from: bobajobrob on 30 May, 2008, 03:14:59 pm

You should upgrade now to 32 GB RAM just to be on the safe side

Hmmm, a cool £1,522.76 to do that - I'll wait until the 4GB modules are a bit cheaper.

rogerzilla · « **Reply #8 on:** 30 May, 2008, 03:33:29 pm »

Quote from: Jaded on 30 May, 2008, 02:22:59 pm

I now have 12GB of RAM and 2.75TB of storage in my Mac Pro.

How long will that last me before I need to upgrade again?

2.75TB? That's a lot of warez, mp3s and grumble.

woollypigs · « **Reply #9 on:** 30 May, 2008, 04:13:09 pm »

What about back up of all that "shite" erm stuff ?

Jaded · « **Reply #10 on:** 30 May, 2008, 05:13:44 pm »

There's a 1.5TB Network drive elsewhere in the house.

Oh, and I also have all the lower capacity drives that used to be in the machine!

TimO · « **Reply #11 on:** 30 May, 2008, 05:22:02 pm »

Big discs are becoming fairly common now. I set up a small server a couple of years ago, and it has sixteen SATA discs in it, variously configured as RAID5, RAID6, and RAID1 (mainly to do with the way it was setup, and not wanting to redo everything). It totals about 5TBytes, which seemed a fair amount then. Now you can buy 1TByte SATA discs for £100+VAT, so a multi-terabyte box for home use, stuffed full of DivX's or DVD ISOs is no longer that big an issue.

I'd quite like to rip my entire DVD collection to a server, so I don't have to hunt around for the discs, but (i) the cost hasn't dropped quite enough yet and (ii) it would take months to do it all!

rae · « **Reply #12 on:** 30 May, 2008, 05:32:24 pm »

Quote

The 16th at 3:27pm to be precise.

That's the time it becomes self aware. Jaded, in a panic tries to shut it down.....

Quote

I'd quite like to rip my entire DVD collection to a server, so I don't have to hunt around for the discs, but (i) the cost hasn't dropped quite enough yet and (ii) it would take months to do it all!

I'm on the verge of that. TB drives are dirt cheap as you say, and a decent RAID controller is also pretty reasonable - though controller failure (and the subsequent inability to rebuild) becomes a worry.

I am reminded of the early discussions about MP3 - with people starting to think about ripping their entire CD collection. If you leave a stack of discs by your desk, then it is easy to rip them while you are doing something else.

ScumOfTheRoad · « **Reply #13 on:** 30 May, 2008, 05:45:58 pm »

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

panfs://panfs:global 91T 120G 91T 1% /panfs

That 91Tbytes does take up a wardrobe-sized cabinet though, and it does have lots of lovely blinkenlights.

Another machine we put in last week has 864 CPU cores, in 108 servers. That's only 44U of rack space, as these are the spiffing Intel servers which put two motherboards into a 1U server, sharing a PSU. Motherboards have onboard Infiniband.
We clocked it at 4.5 Teraflops

Jaded · « **Reply #14 on:** 30 May, 2008, 05:58:30 pm »

Quote from: TimO on 30 May, 2008, 05:22:02 pm

I'd quite like to rip my entire DVD collection to a server, so I don't have to hunt around for the discs, but (i) the cost hasn't dropped quite enough yet and (ii) it would take months to do it all!

I've been doing this with some disks - there's a difficult choice:

Use MacTheRipper and get a clone
Use Handbrake and get a compressed version

The former means the 5.1 sound, quality and subtitles etc. are preserved.
The latter means 6 times less disc space per DVD...

ScumOfTheRoad - don't give me ideas!

Jaded · « **Reply #15 on:** 30 May, 2008, 06:01:04 pm »

Quote from: rae on 30 May, 2008, 05:32:24 pm

Quote
The 16th at 3:27pm to be precise.

That's the time it becomes self aware. Jaded, in a panic tries to shut it down.....

It'll be OK, I'll make it sing "Daisy, daisy".

Woofage · « **Reply #16 on:** 30 May, 2008, 09:29:01 pm »

And here's me thinking my 4GB was slightly extravagant! (I also run a windoze VM but only allocate 1GB for it).

rower40 · « **Reply #17 on:** 30 May, 2008, 09:34:09 pm »

[Nostalgia]
Thinks back to the days of a wobbly 16K RAM pack precariously perched on the back of a Sinclair ZX81...
[/Nostalgia]
Good Old Moore's Law.

rae · « **Reply #18 on:** 30 May, 2008, 09:58:49 pm »

Quote

Another machine we put in last week has 864 CPU cores, in 108 servers. That's only 44U of rack space, as these are the spiffing Intel servers which put two motherboards into a 1U server, sharing a PSU. Motherboards have onboard Infiniband.

FFS, what is your power density in that data centre....or does that have a lot of free space around it....?

FatBloke · « **Reply #19 on:** 30 May, 2008, 10:01:35 pm »

Quote from: Jaded on 30 May, 2008, 06:01:04 pm

Quote from: rae on 30 May, 2008, 05:32:24 pm
Quote
The 16th at 3:27pm to be precise.

That's the time it becomes self aware. Jaded, in a panic tries to shut it down.....

It'll be OK, I'll make it sing "Daisy, daisy".

I'm sorry. I can't do that Dave.

David Martin · « **Reply #20 on:** 30 May, 2008, 10:39:14 pm »

Quote from: ScumOfTheRoad on 30 May, 2008, 05:45:58 pm

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

panfs://panfs:global 91T 120G 91T 1% /panfs

That 91Tbytes does take up a wardrobe-sized cabinet though, and it does have lots of lovely blinkenlights.

Another machine we put in last week has 864 CPU cores, in 108 servers. That's only 44U of rack space, as these are the spiffing Intel servers which put two motherboards into a 1U server, sharing a PSU. Motherboards have onboard Infiniband.
We clocked it at 4.5 Teraflops

That's more cores but not more disk space than I have to play with.

Though ours follows sysadmins law. It is always 95% full and it has run out of inodes.

Running GPFS at present. Looks fairly spiffy - our current 'standard' node is 16GB and 8 cores.

Just about to transition to version 4 of the system - big migration plans at present.

and the 200gb hdd has just died in the kids machine.. Any advice on ressurecting it? Just fails to do anything.

..d

ScumOfTheRoad · « **Reply #21 on:** 31 May, 2008, 05:25:43 am »

Quote from: rae on 30 May, 2008, 09:58:49 pm

Quote
Another machine we put in last week has 864 CPU cores, in 108 servers. That's only 44U of rack space, as these are the spiffing Intel servers which put two motherboards into a 1U server, sharing a PSU. Motherboards have onboard Infiniband.

FFS, what is your power density in that data centre....or does that have a lot of free space around it....?

Very good question. Those servers are split over three racks - we couldn't fill a complete 42U rack with them, for the reasons you say.
Each of those racks has 2x32amp power distribution bars. I just looked (remotely!) at the load on the PDUs - its drawing around 100 amps at the moment, 63 of the servers are under full load.

ScumOfTheRoad · « **Reply #22 on:** 31 May, 2008, 05:29:53 am »

Quote from: David Martin on 30 May, 2008, 10:39:14 pm

and the 200gb hdd has just died in the kids machine.. Any advice on ressurecting it? Just fails to do anything.

Wrap it up in a plastic bag, or an anti-static bag, then put it in the freezer overnight. You might be able to get it to come up and clone the data off it.

bobajobrob · « **Reply #23 on:** 31 May, 2008, 01:34:47 pm »

I was going to suggest the freezer thing, but that usually works for drives that spin up then start clicking or grinding. If it's completely dead then I'm not sure it will help. Worth a try though.

TimO · « **Reply #24 on:** 31 May, 2008, 03:55:19 pm »

Once upon a time with dead drives, it was often that the bearings on the spindle had worn out, and it was sticking. Turning the spindle where the end came out of the case using a pair of pliers would sometimes overcome this friction for long enough to usefully get the data off of it, but as I recall most modern drives don't seem to have the spindle end quite so accessible anymore.