Topics

61

General OpenPOWER Discussion / RCS products for confidential human subject research data

« on: July 22, 2020, 01:06:24 pm »

Many academic institutions around the world have special requirements for the storage of confidential human subject research data.

For example, a private company like Facebook can profile their users and there is little control on that.  But when a team in a university conducts a study on the same human subjects, they have to go to their Institutional Review Board (IRB) for approval.

Each time they start a new study, they have to approach the IRB and submit a plan.  The IRB can ask about their data storage and processing strategy.

This appears to be a use case where legislation introduced decades before modern spyware forces them to look for best practice.  With each new generation of technologies like Intel ME, the OpenPOWER and similar platforms become more compelling for this type of user.

Has anybody already tried to pitch these solutions in that environment?

62

General OpenPOWER Discussion / hosting requirements and strategies

« on: July 21, 2020, 11:38:18 am »

Can anybody comment on ideas or case studies for hosting with the Talos II platform?

For example:

What type of workloads is it most suitable for, or how would you build a Talos II-based rack mount system for different types of workloads?

Many hosting companies sell space by full rack, half rack, quarter rack (approximately) - how would you fit out one of these spaces if you had a pure Talos II strategy, even using the platform for firewall and BGP perhaps?

The largest vendors can provide next day and sometimes same day replacement parts, worldwide.  How would you approximate this with RCS products?  One idea that comes to mind: keeping one or two "community" servers in each rack for developers to log in and run tests, running Jenkins (a.k.a. travis-ci for POWER9) on the understanding that these servers can be scavanged on short notice to resolve production outages.

Is there any interest in hosting here in Switzerland right now?

63

General OpenPOWER Discussion / helping people purchase and get started

« on: July 21, 2020, 10:26:05 am »

I wanted to make this world a little bit easier for other developers to buy in, so I'm making some contributions on the wiki, feedback or enhancements would also be welcome.

In particular, comparing different wiki pages during purchasing can be frustrating, so I've combined key facts in a single table on a single page but please feel free to correct it if you feel anything is not quite right there.

64

Blackbird / using bigger CPUs with some cores disabled on Blackbird?

« on: July 20, 2020, 06:50:51 am »

I started a separate thread about disabling cores in the CPUs in a Talos II

It occurred to me that disabling cores could be a way to reduce CPU power consumption on Blackbird, for example, if you have an 18 core CPU (which is not supported) and you use the operating system to disable 4 cores, leaving just 14 cores, does the power consumption fall within the supported range for the motherboard?

This is probably not a good way to design a new system but if somebody has a spare CPU and they want to temporarily use it in a Blackbird, maybe this would be a useful hack that will reduce the risk of unexpected behavior.

65

General OpenPOWER Discussion / forum sections for different regions?

« on: July 13, 2020, 01:05:59 pm »

Are there enough users here to have sections in the forum for specific regions and/or countries?

For example, advertising local events where OpenPOWER solutions will be on display or simply helping users find each other at local hackerspaces.

66

Applications and Porting / availability for porting work

« on: July 07, 2020, 08:59:09 am »

If there are any urgent porting issues that I could investigate and if anybody is willing to sponsor a few weeks of ad-hoc developer time like that then please get in touch with me.

I'm beginning to try and schedule work on a range of things for the period October - December 2020.

If funding (or other incentives) are available, I'd like to use some of that time to become more familiar with this platform as I believe it has an important role to play in the free software ecosystem.

If anybody can suggest high-priority issues in the hope that somebody else will fund the work please feel free to comment here too.

67

Talos II / Using the μPCIe connector (J10108)

« on: June 17, 2020, 06:04:47 am »

The manual:
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/e/e3/T2P9D01_users_guide_version_1_0.pdf

mentions a μPCIe connector (J10108)

How many lanes does it support?

Can anybody give any example of products that can be connected with this?  For example, can it be used with an M.2 or U.2 adapter for SSDs?

68

GPU Compute / Accelerators / nVidia official proprietary and open source code for POWER

« on: June 16, 2020, 11:09:25 am »

These are some of the links that appear most relevant:

NVIDIA forum, describes support for P100 on POWER8 and V100 on POWER9.

NVIDIA media release about collaboration with IBM on open source machine learning with Tesla V100

IBM pages about the same topic

The V100 products are rather expensive.

Nonetheless, some people have suggested that bits of the proprietary driver can be used to run other NVIDIA GPUs in a POWER system.  This thread might be a useful place to collect comments on topics like that.

69

Applications and Porting / Debian packaging and backport requests for OpenPOWER, Talos II, Blackbird?

« on: June 10, 2020, 09:58:22 am »

Are there any packages that don't exist at all in Debian but would be essential or highly desirable on Debian systems?

Are there packages in unstable that are either not in the stable release or they require something from a newer version to be backported to stable to make them work on ppc64el?

Maybe these could be entered as RFP or Request-for-backport bugs in bugs.debian.org and then a usertag can be added to all of those so they can be found quickly.  This is an example of how arm64 bugs and package requests are tagged.

I'm willing to build packages or backports of the most important things that I will use myself but it would be helpful if people can point them out or enter any hints or concerns through the BTS.

70

General CPU Discussion / Practical hardware and operating systems on Microwatt?

« on: June 09, 2020, 09:15:06 am »

Search engines return a lot of publicity about Microwatt but I couldn't see any practical examples of hardware and operating systems

Which FPGAs are people aiming for or testing right now?

Is it at the stage where somebody could build something vaguely similar to a Raspberry Pi, even if it lacks some of the ports?

Is it stable enough to run any GNU/Linux or BSD OS right now?

71

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Radeon Pro vs regular Radeon cards - worth the price premium for POWER users?

« on: June 05, 2020, 01:05:50 pm »

The RX 5700 came out last year and it was followed 6 months later by the Pro version, specifically the Radeon Pro W5700.

The W5700 is basically double the price of the RX 5700.  From the perspective of a POWER user, is this worthwhile?

Summarizing some of the key differences in the Pro version:

- AMD is testing the hardware and drivers more thoroughly: but do they test on any POWER9 systems?

- AMD is releasing driver updates for the Pro cards on a regular schedule: do these bug fixes appear in the amdgpu release for Linux users just as quickly?

- the marketing material describes various features, such as the AMD Remote Workstation (use your GPU remotely from a laptop) but is that relevant for a Linux user?  The software they offer is proprietary, so there are a large percentage of people in this space who would not use it anyway and we also have free software alternatives

- the last significant benefit I could see: the overall design is less aggressive, slightly less power consumption and lower clockrates than other cards so even ignoring the questions about drivers, maybe it will last longer and be more stable

- some people justified the purchase of Radeon Pro products when they included ECC RAM but in the W5700, it is not ECC, it is the same as the RX 5700

I've got an open mind about this: for example, an OEM built RX 5700 that has liquid cooling and isn't overclocked may be more relevant to some people than the W5700.  But if AMD is regularly testing amdgpu with W5700 on POWER9 then that alone would make me feel they are investing in this architecture.

72

Applications and Porting / VP9 benchmarks: have they improved?

« on: June 05, 2020, 12:12:38 pm »

One of the top search results for VP9 benchmarks is this OpenBenchmarking.org site where POWER9 is the slowest with 9.37 frames per second (less than real time).  Even the Intel i3 achieves 28.38 fps (better than real time).

Has this code been fixed and does anybody know how to get fresh results in that site?  I think it is very unfair to the platform when search engines show something like that if it is no longer valid.

On the other hand, if it is not fixed, has anybody proposed a bounty for working on it?  IBM is asking people to suggest issues that they will fund

73

Talos II / CPU hotplug / completely power down one CPU in a multi-CPU system

« on: June 05, 2020, 05:42:47 am »

Linux provides a mechanism to disable individual cores.  This can be useful to reduce peak power consumption or to simulate a smaller environment, for example, if a developer with a Talos II wants to know how their application would perform on a Blackbird with a 4-core CPU, they can turn off all but 4 cores.

echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

Spoiler: If you put all the cores of one CPU offline with that command then you won't be able to access the RAM and PCI slots connected to that CPU and you might observe strange behaviour.

Is it possible to go one step further and completely power down a CPU socket and maybe the associated RAM banks too, almost as if they were removed from the board?

There is some documentation about Linux kernel hotplug and it suggests x86 only.  Maybe this would be good for another bounty but first it is important to understand whether the Raptor and POWER9 hardware supports this and whether it would lead to energy savings or other benefits.

Problems that would be solved with this:

- reducing heat output from Talos II workstations during summer heatwaves

- extending runtime for a system on UPS batteries

74

Applications and Porting / gstreamer performance, lessons from ffmpeg efforts?

« on: June 02, 2020, 03:01:38 pm »

A bounty recently provided fixes for ffmpeg

Are similar fixes needed for gstreamer or any of its dependencies?

Could lessons from the ffmpeg porting be applied to any other similar multimedia frameworks, for example, gstreamer, the WebRTC media stacks in Firefox and Chrome?

75

General CPU Discussion / equivalent to a HP Z cooler?

« on: June 01, 2020, 04:29:53 pm »

Is there any possibility of somebody marketing a fanless POWER9 cooler similar to the HP Z coolers?

Maybe this would not be feasible for the 22 core chips but it would be very interesting for 4-core.  Not only is it silent but it also eliminates one possible type of mechanical failure.