Website - building budget Xeon crunchers

[rsbriggs]

Howdy everyone!

Bok generously provided me with some space to put up a website about building various Xeon based crunchers. My first attempt will be to describe building a dual Xeon cruncher on a shoestring budget.

I'm just barely getting started on it, and it will take a minimum of a week to even put the basic framework together. But... I thought that maybe some of you would like to take an initial look at my feeble attempts to start writing HTML, and give me some feedback and suggestions...

The link is:

http://xeon.open-dc.org/

Let me know what you think :cower:

[LAURENU2]

That was pretty good rsbriggs
Cant wait till you complete it.
Are you going to talk or add the price of the OS in the next half
T toast to you:cheers: >>:thumbs:

[rsbriggs]

Linux based OS - take your pick:

Fedora, Red Hat, Gentoo, Mandrake, Ubantoo, Debian, SuSE, etc. - Free
M$ Windows - not free.

For a budget box, Linux wins :D

[MerePeer]

Lookin good!

What I hope you publish at some point is what kind of FAD rating you end up with for the single, then the double Xeon setup. Also, do all Xeons have hyperthreading?

Keep up the good work. :thumbs:

[rsbriggs]

I'll do some benchmarking with DC projects. Is there some sort of standard benchmark for rating FaD output??

No, all Xeons don't have HT - that started somewhere around their .13 micron cores, either "Gallatin" or "Prestonia" cores. The 1.7 Ghz part mentioned in the article is an older .18 micron part. That's why it's $70 instead of $300, I guess....

[MerePeer]

For FAD, once start it running it produces a filename called {nodename.tlg}. So if you "grep rating *.tlg" you will see output like this:

Tinkerbell.tlg: 7-APR-05 22:14 CPU rating : 219
Tinkerbell.tlg: 8-APR-05 12:13 CPU rating : 220

You have to login to the FAD forum now before hyperlinks to it will work, but under the member-to-member support forum there is a thread called post your cpu rating http://www.find-a-drug.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4416&start=60 and at the bottom user djnl has posted a consolidated list. Xeons range from 225 to 80 depending on processor speed, hyperthreading, and which O/S. Theoretic rating of 100 supposed to be equal to 1Ghz processor (under Windows?).

[Bok]

Originally posted by rsbriggs
I'll do some benchmarking with DC projects. Is there some sort of standard benchmark for rating FaD output??

No, all Xeons don't have HT - that started somewhere around their .13 micron cores, either "Gallatin" or "Prestonia" cores. The 1.7 Ghz part mentioned in the article is an older .18 micron part. That's why it's $70 instead of $300, I guess....

rsbriggs,

the 1.6Ghz lv's and I presume the 2.0 LV's on the way both support HT :)

Bok

[rsbriggs]

I guess that I meant to say "That's why the 1.7 Ghz Xeon CPUs are $40.00". They were about the last of the non-HT parts. Intel cancelled a planned release of a 2.0 GHz part in the .18 micron manufacturing process, and released their next batch of Xeon parts at 130 nanometers (.13 microns) - the HT "Prestonia" core parts...

Both the parts you mention came after the 1.7 Ghz parts and, yes, they are the .13 micron, HT parts...

Good Grief.... I'm starting to sound like an expert on the history of Xeons. I hope I don't actually turn into one... :scared:

[Dyyryath]

Nice, rsbriggs! :thumbs:

[Dyyryath]

You know, there's no reason you guys can't use the Free-DC site itself for this kind of thing if you'd like.

The site's main purpose is to support our members, so if you'd like to make something like this an 'official' part of the Free-DC site (I noticed the logo :D), all you have to do is say the word. The site lives on Bok's server now so if I'm not around you can always take stuff like that to him.

Anyone who'd like to contribute to the Free-DC site (that I don't spend nearly enough time on, myself) is always more than welcome to do so! :thumbs:

[rsbriggs]

Funny thing about that logo. Take an old but very sexy and regretably unused graphical Free-DC theme by some guy that spells his logon with two y's.
D/L VicMan's photo editor.
Do a little cropping and filling.
Try your hand at doing a little HTML, and see what happens....

Howdy Dyy!! Long time no hear from...

I'd be glad to make it an official part of Free-DC once I actually have enough of it put together to be useful - seems to me that there would be some benefit to having some of our own, homegrown, Free-DC articles available.

Bok offered to let me use the open-dc site to experiment with building an article or two. The thought of actually putting it up somewhere on Free-DC didn't cross my mind...

[Bok]

Dyy,

I just didn't know whether the DNS was automatic for all xxx.free-dc.org pointing to the box???

If it is, I'll switch it and use that in the future, if that's ok?

Bok

[Dyyryath]

It's not, but I can hook you up with the stuff you need to access the DNS settings for the domain. You're more than welcome to add subdomains when you need to.

In this case, though, we should probably add a section under the www.free-dc.org site specifically for articles likes this (called 'Articles' or something maybe :)). It'd be pretty easy to add his content to a page that looks like the rest of the site. That way it'd work with the site themes, too.