Re: [gentoo-amd64] error updating deep world gentoo general
Gavin Seddon, mused, then expounded: For imaging we use SGI Octane or Octane 2 however I have found recent Nvidia graphics cards to be as good, here at least I stick to crt SGI monitors; they are cheap and perform. Also, Irix (SGI OS) is awful. For weeks now I've been trying to install ssh. It WON'T. SSH is part of any recent IRIX dist. Around 6.5.20 or 6.5.24. It's on the overlay CDs. See about upgrading to something resaonably recent - 6.5.29 should be hitting the streets next month. But, yes, a lot of Opensource doesn't play well. Best bet if you don't want to upgrade IRIX, is to try out Nekochan.org and switch over to their sets of packages as Freeware is not being updated anymore. Still, I recommend a more recent IRIX if you aren't running it. I was debating last night whether to install Gentoo on the Octanes. My fear is, If I do: a. Sybyl, the MOST useful drug design software won't run and. b. I will have to reinstall Irix. I did it once. It's a farce. It took all day (no breaks). You even partition when it's installed. I tried out Gentoo on an O200 and found it was broken - none of the stages actually worked. But I've been working with the ia64 devs to get the LiveCD for Altix workng, thus haven't persued the Gentoo on MIPS. I'll get back to that as time allows. As to IRIX installs - if you know the tricks - don't listen to the Start here, and don't do the voodoo chicken dance - k *, i S, i U, and step through the packages with inst (ignoring freeware, which is best done with swmgr) - you need to know the KB keys - n, N, p, P, i, then with some paticence, it's pretty painless. But then it took me a couple of years to figure this out. It's a bit like Zen or the Force - let inst guide the way. :) I think SG have had their day. We won't buy any more. Furthermore, the Opterons are faster and cost 1/10 the price. True. The problem is very few companies are making commerical grade systems. Most just take existing motherboards, many which are simply consummer grade quality and putting them in chassis. Very few actually offer systems with remote management and servicability. Companies like Tyan and Supermicro offer pretty robust motherboards, but getting their remote management options from a retail vendor is very diffcult. And getting it part of a system adds another US$1000+ to the cost of the system. Regardless, best of luck with your systems. Bob - -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-amd64] error updating deep world gentoo general
That's valuable info. These dual core amd's are on ebay for 'next-to-nothing', pls tell me more, what are the PPC machines, I have seen PPC to be an option for a Gentoo dist. but didn't know what it is. There's a reason that Itinium was called the Itanic It's probably the biggest waste of effort Intel and HP have ever embarked on. Next to no-one supports it, and it's special features arn't really all that special compared to the average Opteron. If you want the most robust/fastest chipset, Power chips are the way to go. (Not Power PC (PPC), just Power chips). A workstation running dual Power5 chips would more or less obliterate anything you could care to throw at it. If you're strictly speaking of the x86 world of chips (Which btw the Itanium isn't really more then 85% compatible) then the dual core socket 940 opterons are still the best chip, followed by the dual core socket 939 Athlon 64s. If you are running a rack or thirty of blades, the difference between the IA64 and the AMD64 heat output and wattage ingestion more then pays for itself. Performance wise, the Opterons are also far enough ahead of the Intel offerings to make it worthwhile to stick with AMD. YMMV and My opinions are my own. -- Dr Gavin Seddon School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-amd64] error updating deep world gentoo general
Dear Bob, You obviously know you tech stuff. The number crunching I (we) do is huge floating point calculations used in drug design (quantum dynamics/quantum mechanics). At the moment the fastest results come from the Opterons with 1Gb ram. I'm not sure of their spec. But, we have found calculations to be faster on 64bit machines rather than 32. For imaging we use SGI Octane or Octane 2 however I have found recent Nvidia graphics cards to be as good, here at least I stick to crt SGI monitors; they are cheap and perform. Also, Irix (SGI OS) is awful. For weeks now I've been trying to install ssh. It WON'T. I was debating last night whether to install Gentoo on the Octanes. My fear is, If I do: a. Sybyl, the MOST useful drug design software won't run and. b. I will have to reinstall Irix. I did it once. It's a farce. It took all day (no breaks). You even partition when it's installed. I think SG have had their day. We won't buy any more. Furthermore, the Opterons are faster and cost 1/10 the price. It depends. In general, looking at MTBF numbers, Itanium systems are less reliable than most 2P to 4P x86 servers out there. But more reliable than most RISC based servers, though IBM's Blue Gene blade servers may have an equivlant record or even be better. (Note: Realibility when I use it means 24x7 full time compute load, not shutting it down at night nor the system standing idle.) As to performance, it kind of depends. The bone stock Intel chipset Itaniums have fairly constrained FSB to memory bandwidth. Itanums where companies have used their own chipsets - such as us (SGI) and higher end HP, among others, can deliever some impressive bandwidth to memory and I/O. Thus improving overall computing throughput and high sustained compute power. And depending upon the problem set, an Itanium based system may be faster than amd64 based systems. If your problem set is more integer based or transaction based, the amd64 will perform better. If it's more FP based, memory constrained, threaded, and I/O bound, then an Itainium based system might be better. If you need more than 1 TB physical memory and up to 512 cpus in a single system image, then amd64 solutions won't be there until HyperTransport III, sometime next year, perhaps. Downside - you have to recompile your apps to get the best out of them. Any x86 32bit code will run in an emulation layer, which can be very fast or very slow. Setiathome, 32 bit client screamed on our Itanium's (ran it on a 512P system). Oh, and you'll need Intel's compiler. On the AMD side, figure about 80% FP performance and 102% Integer performance compared to an Itanium cpu. Memory bandwidth tends to match when AMDs are used in 4P or greater configs. I/O bandwidth is a bit constained in some instances, but seems pretty tolerable and really isn't much of an issue until more than 4 PCI-X slots are needed. But a lot of that is based on which chipset is being used. And to get the est out of your apps, you'll need to compile them with the PathScale compiler. If you're interested in an in-office/deskside style system. the AMD solution is probably a better match, especially if your application needs only 1 or 2 Gfx pipes, and fits in less than 16 GB memory. If you need department scientifc serving, then benchmarking your apps on each platform is the better way to find which fits better. If you need serious visualizaton ability, with 3 or more - up to 16, Gfx pipes, then there isn't much choice, no AMD vendor has produced a system capable of doing that, though with some special Nvidia cards, it's possible to get 4 Gfx pipe on 2 PCIe x16 slots. That's not to say it works well, as it's pretty much beta hardware and drivers at the moment. Bob -- - QA Curmudgeon. Wacky and bizarre testing(TM) performed while-U-wait. - See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html - -- Dr Gavin Seddon School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-amd64] error updating deep world gentoo general
On Sat, 2006-01-21 at 10:45 +, Gavin Seddon wrote: That's valuable info. These dual core amd's are on ebay for 'next-to-nothing', pls tell me more, what are the PPC machines, I have seen PPC to be an option for a Gentoo dist. but didn't know what it is. There's a reason that Itinium was called the Itanic It's probably the biggest waste of effort Intel and HP have ever embarked on. Next to no-one supports it, and it's special features arn't really all that special compared to the average Opteron. If you want the most robust/fastest chipset, Power chips are the way to go. (Not Power PC (PPC), just Power chips). A workstation running dual Power5 chips would more or less obliterate anything you could care to throw at it. If you're strictly speaking of the x86 world of chips (Which btw the Itanium isn't really more then 85% compatible) then the dual core socket 940 opterons are still the best chip, followed by the dual core socket 939 Athlon 64s. If you are running a rack or thirty of blades, the difference between the IA64 and the AMD64 heat output and wattage ingestion more then pays for itself. Performance wise, the Opterons are also far enough ahead of the Intel offerings to make it worthwhile to stick with AMD. YMMV and My opinions are my own. -- Dr Gavin Seddon School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. PPC is the chip-set formerly used by Apple aka G4 G5. They run slower then an x86 chip-set, but pack more into each cycle (For more info on that look up the RISC vs. CISC debate/comparisons such as here: http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/projects-00/risc/risccisc/ ). Generally speaking, with software designed for it, a G5 2.1 GHz is roughly equivalent in power to a ~AMD64 3000+. However, you'll note I suggested the Power chip, not the Power PC chip. The Power chip is a series of chips designed and manufactured by IBM for use in heavy workstations and servers. The current generation of the Power series is called the Power5.(Links to press nause: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/news/pressreleases/2005/oct/annc_1004.html http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/494/mackerras.html) I don't know if Gentoo supports the Power series of chips, but I do know that IBM has gotten SuSE and RedHat (at minimum) ported onto it (More useful links: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/power/articles.html ). Hope this helps. B. Vance -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-amd64] error updating deep world gentoo general
On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:32 +, Gavin Seddon wrote: Hi, thanks Duncan. I have renamed this since the topic has changed and it isn't really relevant to updating. Has anyone seen this months new scientist? There's an article about OS's used for browsing. It gives the percentages of different OS used to browse the www. Windows is by far the most and Linux has only a few percent, in the UK. An old colleague of mine proposed it was because ms-farce is 'better'. I pointed out could it not be due to people in the UK generally being uneducated or lazy. Since at Manchester in our lab we use Fedora as it's quick to install and very easy to use so undergrads don't get intimidated. If I had my way, Debian would be better for the majority of systems with Gentoo on the Opterons. I have found Gentoo to be excellent due to it's configurability (is this a word) and speed. I have no intention of changing now however, I am always 'on-the-lookout for a superior workstation so I may change in the future to ia64 Gentoo. Are Iitanium machines the best (robust/speed). Or, are the Opterons or athlon64 better. For that matter how do amd machines differ? -- Dr Gavin Seddon School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. There's a reason that Itinium was called the Itanic It's probably the biggest waste of effort Intel and HP have ever embarked on. Next to no-one supports it, and it's special features arn't really all that special compared to the average Opteron. If you want the most robust/fastest chipset, Power chips are the way to go. (Not Power PC (PPC), just Power chips). A workstation running dual Power5 chips would more or less obliterate anything you could care to throw at it. If you're strictly speaking of the x86 world of chips (Which btw the Itanium isn't really more then 85% compatible) then the dual core socket 940 opterons are still the best chip, followed by the dual core socket 939 Athlon 64s. If you are running a rack or thirty of blades, the difference between the IA64 and the AMD64 heat output and wattage ingestion more then pays for itself. Performance wise, the Opterons are also far enough ahead of the Intel offerings to make it worthwhile to stick with AMD. YMMV and My opinions are my own. -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
