David Christensen writes:
On 2020-10-01 14:37, Linux-Fan wrote:
[...]
Typical workloads: data compression (Debian live build, xz), virtual machines (software installation, updates) Rarely: GPGPU (e.g. nVidia CUDA, but some experimentation with OpenCL, too) single-core load coupled with very high RAM use (cbmc)
[...]
I suggest identifying your workloads, how much CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc., each requires, and then dividing them across your several computers.
Division across multiple machines... I am already doing this for data that exceeds my current 4T storage (2x2T HDD, 2x2T "slow" SSD local and 4x1T outsourced to the other machine). I currently do this for data I need rather rarely such that I can run the common tasks on a single machine. Doing this for all (or large amounts of data) will require running at least two machines at the same time which may increase the idle power draw and possibilities for failure?
Understand that a 4 core 5 GHz CPU and a 16 core 2.5 GHz CPU have similar prices and power consumption, but the former will run sequential tasks twice as fast and the latter will run concurrent tasks twice as fast.
Is this still true today? AFAIK all modern CPUs "boost" their frequency if they are lightly loaded. Also, the larger CPUs tend to come with more cache which may speed up single-core applications, too.
I would think that you should convert one of your existing machines into a file server. Splitting 4 TB across 2 @ 2 TB HDD's and 2 @ 4 TB SSD's can work, but 4 @ 4 TB SSD's with a 10 Gbps Ethernet connection should be impressive. If you choose ZFS, it will need memory. The rule of thumb is 5 GB of memory per 1 TB of storage. So, pick a machine that has at least 20 GB of memory.
4x4T is surely nice and future-proof but currently above budget :) I saw that the Supermicro AS-2113S-WTRT can do 6xU.2 drives. In case I chose Supermicro this would allow upgrading to such a 4x4T configuration.
As for the workstation, it is difficult to find a vendor that supports Debian. But, there are vendors that support Ubuntu; which is based upon Debian. So, you can run Ubuntu and you might be able to run Debian:https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=ubuntu%20workstation
My experience with HP and Fujitsu Workstations is that they run well with Debian. I am still thinking that buying two systems will be more expensive and more power draw. Using one of the existent systems will slow some things down to their speed -- the current "fastest" system here has a Xeon E3-1231 v3 and while it has 3.4GHz it is surely slower (even singlethreaded) than current 16-core server CPUs...
Thinking of it, a possible distribution accross multiple machines may be * (Existent) Storage server (1U, existent Fujitsu RX 1330 M1) [It does not do NVMe SSDs, though -- alternatively put the disks in the VM server?] * (New) VM server (2U, lots of RAM) * (New) Workstation (4U, GPU)For interactive use and experimentation with VMs I would need to power-on all three systems. For non-VM use, it would have to be two... it is an interesting solution that stays within what the systems were designed to do but I think it is currently too much for my uses.
Still, thanks for the suggestion.OT: The hints about the details of e-mail encoding and signing are appreciated. Some other notes are here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/courier/mailman/courier-cone/?viewmonth=202010 Linux-Fan Non-ASCII chars follow...: ──── ö § ö ───── *E-Mail signed for experimentation*
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