Messages

211

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

« on: August 16, 2020, 02:18:44 pm »

As there are multiple threads about this, I felt it would be useful to create a wiki page about GPU selection criteria

Feel free to improve it.  A shortlist of products tested by Raptor and other experienced users might be useful too.

212

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Which GPU would *you* choose?

« on: August 16, 2020, 02:18:19 pm »

As there are multiple threads about this, I felt it would be useful to create a wiki page about GPU selection criteria

Feel free to improve it.  A shortlist of products tested by Raptor and other experienced users might be useful too.

213

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Which GPU would *you* choose?

« on: August 12, 2020, 12:40:00 pm »

I put some of my own observations and preferences in the thread about Radeon Pro vs regular Radeon

Part of the answer depends on what everybody else is using: for example, if a lot of people use a particular card and actively contribute bug fixes to the driver then that makes it compelling.

214

General CPU Discussion / Re: POWER9 water cooling kit

« on: August 10, 2020, 05:49:34 pm »

Instead of using radiator fans on the water cooling circuit, are there any external chiller or heat pump options that could reduce overall heat emission, even if they don't reduce net noise emissions a lot?  This type of option requires a way to dump the heat, much the same way a split-system air conditioner moves heat to the outdoor component.

215

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: August 07, 2020, 09:46:00 am »

Raptor may not want to have all these extra chores though.  A lot of organizations recently started hiring people in eastern European countries to help with things like this.

For example,

• phpList has set up a small office in Albania
• Debian had an Outreachy intern from Albania to handle contact DebConf sponsors
• Prishtina Hackerspace, in Kosovo, has received funding from other groups to hire a publicity officer on a permanent basis

The wage expectations vary, starting from about $300/month for a student in a non-technical field.  There are a small number of really good developers there but they insist on globally competitive rates of pay.  In between those two extremes there are many possibilities or opportunities to piggy back on other groups there.

216

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian

« on: August 02, 2020, 04:16:40 am »

The announcement page doesn't really tell us much about the impact for ppc64* users.  This is where it would be really useful to have tags for ppc64* issues, we could then run a report in the BTS and see exactly which issues were fixed by each new release and which issues are fixed in unstable and ready for backporting.

217

Condor / Re: Condor cancelled

« on: August 01, 2020, 01:52:34 am »

As suggested in another thread, the most useful thing to do right now may be making the best use of the Talos II Lite

Even if the existing Condor design is being mothballed, maybe the name Condor can be reserved for some future product.  POWER10 will reach us in 2021 or 2022, look out for return of the Condor (and keep your children and pets out of the way)

218

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: hosting requirements and strategies

« on: July 31, 2020, 04:12:05 pm »

2.) We can do custom (paid) support contracts for things like overnight replacement parts.   We just don't get that many organizations that feel they require it, so it's normally negotiated on a one-off basis.  Our suspicion is that many organizations try to keep spare parts on hand so as to avoid ending up in an emergency call out / parts acquisition scenario, but we don't have hard data to validate that.

That is why I suggested including some community servers in a local rack here.  They could be cannibalized at short notice to provide spare parts for more critical systems.  A spare server running Jenkins (a.k.a travis-ci on ppc64le) may be better than a spare server in a box.

The next-day swap out is OK in the US but in most other regions, it is hard to get delivery under 2 working days and even then it can be incredibly expensive.

219

General CPU Discussion / max memory speeds

« on: July 31, 2020, 03:46:40 pm »

AbstractConcept made this edit in the wiki

I read somewhere that RAM operates at different speeds:

1 channel filled: 2666MHz

2 channels filled: 2400MHz

4 channels filled: 2133MHz

but the edit by AbstractConcept implies that RAM is always clocked at 2666MHz

Can anybody clarify?

220

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: hosting requirements and strategies

« on: July 31, 2020, 11:43:21 am »

There are a number of Swiss data centers within walking distance from my home.  If I don't feel like walking, I can reach any of them in less than 5 minutes on my motorbike.  If anybody wanted to collaborate on setting up a rack of Talos II servers in one of these, I'd be happy to collaborate on that and try to come up with a support agreement that is proportional to the experimental nature of the platform.  For example, call-out fees for reboots and such things could be minimized or waived if these fit within my visits to the sites.

221

General CPU Discussion / Re: v2 CPU availability?

« on: July 31, 2020, 11:06:08 am »

What is the idle power consumption of the 22 core chips?  Do they generate heat constantly or only when you throw work at them?

For a multi-seat configuration, one Talos II system running a little hot is probably putting out less heat than three separate Intel Xeon workstations.

222

General CPU Discussion / Re: v2 CPU availability?

« on: July 31, 2020, 10:15:10 am »

I had the impression your comment may be a bit sarcastic but there are cases where 22 core CPUs are useful in a workstation

For example, a multi-seat configuration where 2 or 3 users have keyboards and monitors connected to the same workstation, somebody who is compiling a lot of C++ or Java, somebody who does a lot of data analysis.  For some people, it may be all of the above.  The Talos II dual CPU is really good value for money in such cases.

223

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: July 31, 2020, 08:07:30 am »

Personally, I can empathize with all those small businesses operating in the free and open source technology space who may also be impacted by things out of their control, whether it is a loss of sales, loss of colleagues, loss of family or all of the above.  On the other hand, I don't want to speculate about Raptor or any other specific business.

If any small business is looking for community support at this time, I hope they will be able to reach out to the right supporters in the community and find a constructive way forward.

Looking at Raptor in particular: I had deferred buying new workstations for a number of years.  But with the increase in working from home, it became important for me to get a new workstation in 2020 and Raptor was high on my list.  Not everybody is fortunate enough to be purchasing a workstation this year but if you know people who need to maximize their productivity while working from home, suggesting they consider Raptor's products may be helpful.  That is why I tried to capture some of my own purchasing experience here.

224

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: helping people purchase and get started

« on: July 30, 2020, 02:27:17 pm »

Continent is not always helpful for tax/customs purposes and also due to language differences.

For example,

- Switzerland is not in the EU VAT and customs system

- consumers from Italy and France (where taxes are over 20%) drive into Switzerland to buy things like memory sticks, SSDs, CPUs, laptops, digital cameras and SD cards at 8% tax.  They are supposed to declare these products at the border and pay the extra 12% when returning to their own country but I suspect they sometimes forget.

- businesses in Italy, France or any other EU country don't need to pay the VAT taxes, so they buy from their local suppliers to get faster delivery and local support

- the UK doesn't use the Euro, they use Sterling and as they are a very big economy, their local suppliers are very efficient for people who live in the UK.  After Brexit, they may have customs barriers, nobody knows right now. I used to live in the UK and if I lived there now, I would probably want to order from a local UK supplier, pay in GBP and receive the product next day

So it is probably useful to have some groupings, e.g. a single page for all EU countries as well as some local pages for big countries like UK and France.  Please also remember language is a factor in EU countries, if people in Italy and France can buy the same product at the same price from a supplier using their own language, they will usually prefer that.

The Swiss page can be seen as a proof-of-concept, any ideas or initiatives to extrapolate from that are welcome.

225

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: helping people purchase and get started

« on: July 30, 2020, 09:49:53 am »

My next step in this area is creating localized ordering pages

I created one here for Switzerland because I know a few people nearby who are curious about ordering

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/LocalSuppliers/Switzerland

The concept is simple: people can click through to some local supplier to build up a shopping cart of local parts.  Most people in Switzerland live near a Digitec store, so I created Digitec links as an example.

This concept could be adapted for other countries.  For example, people could maintain pages like this in the wiki and share them with local colleagues and friends.

To automate, it could be driven from a Git repository, for example, using Jekyll or Jinja2 templates.  The inputs would be
a) table of suggested parts (e.g. the Define 7 XL case, long name, EAN, anything to help search for it)
b) table of local suppliers, by state/country, including company name and a URL template string for putting the part into a search

With an automated solution, somebody could change a part name (e.g. adding the Define 8 XL case whenever it exists) and it would propagate to every country page.

This is not an attempt to create a new shopping cart, it is simply a complement for existing shopping carts, to help people save time and increase the chances that people end up with similar supported components.