Hi guys, so never done WCG however I know the concept well, With the fact I am getting solar power installed at home I figured I could make most of the power to help out WCG and the TPU team?
I am decommissioning the following from work and figured they'd make good WCG crunchers? let me know your thoughts.
Two x HP Proliant DL360 G9's with the following specs
- 2 x Xeon 8 Core 16 Thread (32 total threads at 2.5Ghz)
- 128Gb Ram
- 12TB of SAS HDD (15k)
Not sure if they'd have much of an impact but figured the systems could work well? Welcome your thoughts.
Hey
@Hellfire
@thebluebumblebee is correct, I use old servers from work to crunch away, be careful tho, they really can chew through the electric lol
The ones I have are Dell R710's, I use them with two L5640's as they are lower power CPUs they might take a little longer to get work units done, but as I always believe, it's not about doing this fast just efficiently
When the server is running and the WCG is running on all 24 threads, I believe the server can use up about 275w without too much fuss. This one has 5 1Tb drives, SAS external card and dual PSUs (which you use more power running together as I'm sure you know)
My SR-2 which uses X5650's at stock speeds, that uses up about the 310w but the CPU clock speeds are slightly different, 2.26Ghz for the L5640's and 2.67Ghz for the X5650's. I've not overclocked them but the system is fully water cooled
The specs of the server look amazing
I'm hoping to grab an upgrade of a server or two at some point as I'm looking at the R720 which would be Sandy Bridge Xeon's I believe, so hopefully more efficient. I think the CPUs they use aren't clocked high but again, just work well
Masses of storage and those 15k spinners will be amazing for fast access - Question, are the drive bays in the DL360's, 2.5" or 3.5"? If they where smaller drives, using 2 for an OS or VMware or whatever then the rest for storage if you so desire
If I leave the R710 on 24/7, I believe I can average about 10k - 12k a day with it, depending on work units
My 5960X @ 4.2Ghz averages a little higher than it and at slightly lower watts. I'm sad cos I test what each server takes at idle, load etc, just gives me an idea of how much it would cost to run if I wasn't using solar
Answer is, a lot!
Are you thinking about only using them for crunching? If so:
Crunching does not use much ram.
Those HDD's would use a fair amount of watts, I'd get a small cheap SSD or 7200 rpm laptop HDD instead.
Most of use would recommend using Linux.
I think
@phill is using some similar equipment, also with solar.
To get started with WCG, just use this link:
https://join.worldcommunitygrid.org?teamId=S8TLJ6TFV1
Cheers,
Honestly, got nothing else that I can use them for, either that or sell them maybe.
Not going to use them for much else except a media server (hence the disks) but that'll be running on another VM, I'd have 2 VM's set up for Crunching, probably allocate a small amount of drive space and minimal ram with 28 of the threads on one and 32 on the other, so I reckon maybe 60 threads of computing power across both racks.
I'm with
@thebluebumblebee on the ram side of things too, as long as you have 1Gb per thread and seeing you have 128Gb of ram in each server, I believe your covered
I agree also with the HDs, if you can get away with smaller/slower drives, it does really make a difference..
I would consider putting the servers in maybe a garage where the temp would be quite low, as I'd guess inside the house, they might get warm.. I need to do some testing with some other servers I've had as with 7 going at once, I think it might get too hot and simply not work.. I'll have to find out
What do you use for VM's? We use VMWare at work but I believe the free copy only supports a single CPU (however many cores though) but on all of my desktops I have running with it, I just put Linux on there and add TeamViewer to access them. I hook them up to monitors, as then you can get the full 1080P res and not 640 x 480 or whatever it might be.. That's painful to use!!
With 60 threads working away, you'd have a good few point each day
If you choose specific work units, that will also boost scores but I tend to just do them all and don't worry about my scores as such..
As for the solar, I have a 3.6kW array, works so very well in the summer months, can make up to 30kW's a day which is quite hard to use up! It'll peak about the 4kW mark, so this is why I try to run more during the day, sadly though it's hotter then too so kind of a right pain
I really hope I've not waffled on too much, if there's anything else you need to know or have questions on please just ask