Now? You want to do this now?
I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!
I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!
Saturday, April 04
Awards And Stuffs
The coveted (and rarely-given) Doesn't Suck Award today goes to the Xapian search engine. I've been testing it out for my day job, and it's quite impressive. I'll definitely be using it in a future version of Minx - our current search function works by brute force, which works surprisingly well, but will become a problem sooner or later.
The pre-release versions of Xapian feature not just full text and tag-based indexing, but geospatial and image indexing too. And when I say image indexing, I mean "find me all the images that look similar to this one". It does - as far as I can tell - a search in 49 dimensions to pull this trick off. Seriously.
The coveted (and rarely-given) Doesn't Suck Award today goes to the Xapian search engine. I've been testing it out for my day job, and it's quite impressive. I'll definitely be using it in a future version of Minx - our current search function works by brute force, which works surprisingly well, but will become a problem sooner or later.
The pre-release versions of Xapian feature not just full text and tag-based indexing, but geospatial and image indexing too. And when I say image indexing, I mean "find me all the images that look similar to this one". It does - as far as I can tell - a search in 49 dimensions to pull this trick off. Seriously.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:37 AM
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Ultra Plus, Ne?
By the way, all those SpecIntThingy 2006 numbers in the previous post?
They're normalised to the Sun Ultra Enterprise 2.
I used to work on one of those, albeit the 200MHz version rather than the 300MHz (actually 296MHz) version used as the Spec '06 baseline. I even have an Ultra 5 in my closet. Right next to the SGI O2...
For the baseline tests, they only used one CPU. Even so, this new server is equal, for the purposes of general data crunching, to one hundred dual-processor Sun Ultra Enterprise 2's.
Which was 1997 hardware, sure, but they used the 2005 compilers and OS for the baseline testing, so the software isn't that far removed from today.
We have 4x the number of cores, and ~8x the clock speed, so there's a factor of 3 improvement in efficiency. That's not too shabby; the Ultra 2 was a pretty solid machine in its day.
By the way, all those SpecIntThingy 2006 numbers in the previous post?
They're normalised to the Sun Ultra Enterprise 2.
I used to work on one of those, albeit the 200MHz version rather than the 300MHz (actually 296MHz) version used as the Spec '06 baseline. I even have an Ultra 5 in my closet. Right next to the SGI O2...
For the baseline tests, they only used one CPU. Even so, this new server is equal, for the purposes of general data crunching, to one hundred dual-processor Sun Ultra Enterprise 2's.
Which was 1997 hardware, sure, but they used the 2005 compilers and OS for the baseline testing, so the software isn't that far removed from today.
We have 4x the number of cores, and ~8x the clock speed, so there's a factor of 3 improvement in efficiency. That's not too shabby; the Ultra 2 was a pretty solid machine in its day.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:24 AM
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Attack Of The Killer Akanes
Still waiting to hear back from SoftLayer sales - apparently they're swamped with orders for the new servers.
Meanwhile, doing a bit of poking around. The SpecInt 2006 score for the Xeon 5520 - the CPUs we'll have in the new server - is 27.9. That's in a SuperMicro system, exactly what we'll be using. The score for the Core i7 920 I was using for comparison is 28.6, so we won't be far short of that. The score for our current Xeon 3220 is 20.3. No scores yet for the Xeon 3520, which is what I'd planned to upgrade to, but it should be similar to the 920, because it's the exact same chip.
So I'm pleased and a little surprised by that.
Floating point is 32.0 for the 5520 vs. 19.0 for the 3220. And 29.3 for the 920... Odd. Maybe a new compiler revision? Too lazy right now to read the detailed test reports.
For SpecIntRate (the multi-threaded version), the score is 202 for the 5520 vs. 59.2 for the 3220 and 109 for the 920.
And finally SpecFPRate is 160 for the 5520, 42.2 for the 3220, and 78.9 for the 920.
So the new server will be three times as fast as the old servers (but it will replace two and a half servers), and have three times the memory (and will replace three servers worth of memory). It will be cheaper, easier to manage, more robust, and more expandable - I can take it to 48GB of memory if needed, where all three of the current servers are full.
No room for extra disks, though, unless I go for a 2U model, but that costs... Huh. That's not that much more expensive at all, and comes with redundant power supplies, and 18 DIMM slots and 12 drive bays (instead of 12 and 4). That's definitely worth considering.
Intel will be releasing 6-core versions of the new Xeons in the next 12 months, so that will get us up to 24 virtual cores, 72GB of memory, and 12 disks.
That should do. Yes, I think that should do.
Still waiting to hear back from SoftLayer sales - apparently they're swamped with orders for the new servers.
Meanwhile, doing a bit of poking around. The SpecInt 2006 score for the Xeon 5520 - the CPUs we'll have in the new server - is 27.9. That's in a SuperMicro system, exactly what we'll be using. The score for the Core i7 920 I was using for comparison is 28.6, so we won't be far short of that. The score for our current Xeon 3220 is 20.3. No scores yet for the Xeon 3520, which is what I'd planned to upgrade to, but it should be similar to the 920, because it's the exact same chip.
So I'm pleased and a little surprised by that.
Floating point is 32.0 for the 5520 vs. 19.0 for the 3220. And 29.3 for the 920... Odd. Maybe a new compiler revision? Too lazy right now to read the detailed test reports.
For SpecIntRate (the multi-threaded version), the score is 202 for the 5520 vs. 59.2 for the 3220 and 109 for the 920.
And finally SpecFPRate is 160 for the 5520, 42.2 for the 3220, and 78.9 for the 920.
So the new server will be three times as fast as the old servers (but it will replace two and a half servers), and have three times the memory (and will replace three servers worth of memory). It will be cheaper, easier to manage, more robust, and more expandable - I can take it to 48GB of memory if needed, where all three of the current servers are full.
No room for extra disks, though, unless I go for a 2U model, but that costs... Huh. That's not that much more expensive at all, and comes with redundant power supplies, and 18 DIMM slots and 12 drive bays (instead of 12 and 4). That's definitely worth considering.
Intel will be releasing 6-core versions of the new Xeons in the next 12 months, so that will get us up to 24 virtual cores, 72GB of memory, and 12 disks.
That should do. Yes, I think that should do.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Friday, April 03
Combinatorial Credit Crunch
Got the pricing for the new servers.
The single-processor pricing is scary. The competition is offering Core i7 servers as low as $249 for a 2.66GHz i7 with 12GB of RAM. SoftLayer's cheapest is $299 for a 2GHz Xeon 5506 with 3GB of RAM.
But by taking advantage of their specials, a dual 2.26GHz Xeon 5520 with 12GB of RAM is only $399. More expensive, yes, but two CPUs vs one and proper server hardware with ECC RAM (expandable to 48GB, too).
One of those - with a bit more memory, RAID, an SSD, and OpenVZ - could handle both mu.nu and mee.nu easily, except for bandwidth requirements. The best option for now might be one big powerful server, and one small server for backups, ermgencies, and bandwidth pooling. (Each SoftLayer server comes with 2TB of bandwidth.)
Yeah. I think that will work, and won't crunch the budget too much. Could even work out cheaper than the three servers we have now. I'll have to play around with the configurator thingy some more.
Update: So what we're looking at is:
Akane
2 x Xeon 5520 (2.26GHz, quad core, hyperthreaded)
18GB DDR3 ECC Registered RAM
3 x 1TB SATA w. Hardware RAID-5
32GB Intel X25-E SSD
CentOS 5 / OpenVZ / CPanel
Mikan and/or Kurumi
Opteron 170 (2.0GHz, dual-core)
2GB DDR ECC Registered RAM
250GB SATA
CentOS 5 / OpenVZ / Maybe CPanel
Akane and her virtual sisters will handle the bulk of the work, while Mikan and/or Kurumi handle backups and front-end processing.
It's a pretty good config, and even with two small FEPs ..costs no more than I'm paying now. I think it's a go, but I'll contact sales first and see what they say.
I might go for 24GB of RAM; from a recent low of 62¢ the Australian dollar is now back around 72¢. Not as nice (for me) as when it was near parity, but still an improvement. Guess I have one thing to thank Obama for...
Got the pricing for the new servers.
The single-processor pricing is scary. The competition is offering Core i7 servers as low as $249 for a 2.66GHz i7 with 12GB of RAM. SoftLayer's cheapest is $299 for a 2GHz Xeon 5506 with 3GB of RAM.
But by taking advantage of their specials, a dual 2.26GHz Xeon 5520 with 12GB of RAM is only $399. More expensive, yes, but two CPUs vs one and proper server hardware with ECC RAM (expandable to 48GB, too).
One of those - with a bit more memory, RAID, an SSD, and OpenVZ - could handle both mu.nu and mee.nu easily, except for bandwidth requirements. The best option for now might be one big powerful server, and one small server for backups, ermgencies, and bandwidth pooling. (Each SoftLayer server comes with 2TB of bandwidth.)
Yeah. I think that will work, and won't crunch the budget too much. Could even work out cheaper than the three servers we have now. I'll have to play around with the configurator thingy some more.
Update: So what we're looking at is:
Akane
2 x Xeon 5520 (2.26GHz, quad core, hyperthreaded)
18GB DDR3 ECC Registered RAM
3 x 1TB SATA w. Hardware RAID-5
32GB Intel X25-E SSD
CentOS 5 / OpenVZ / CPanel
Mikan and/or Kurumi
Opteron 170 (2.0GHz, dual-core)
2GB DDR ECC Registered RAM
250GB SATA
CentOS 5 / OpenVZ / Maybe CPanel
Akane and her virtual sisters will handle the bulk of the work, while Mikan and/or Kurumi handle backups and front-end processing.
It's a pretty good config, and even with two small FEPs ..costs no more than I'm paying now. I think it's a go, but I'll contact sales first and see what they say.
I might go for 24GB of RAM; from a recent low of 62¢ the Australian dollar is now back around 72¢. Not as nice (for me) as when it was near parity, but still an improvement. Guess I have one thing to thank Obama for...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:34 AM
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Wednesday, April 01
Judicious Application Of Explosives
Since the nice 2.66GHz Xeon 3500 servers I wanted are a non-starter (thanks SuperMicro, you weenies), I'm looking at dual-processor boxes. They'll cost more, but of course they'll deliver more. But the affordable processor models are the slower end of the range, so we're looking at 2GHz or maybe 2.26GHz. (But we'll have two of them per server, each quad core and hyperthreaded, so 16 virtual cores.)
Once I get pricing (soon, I hope), I'll twist the arm of the friendly sales people a bit and order the new boxes.
Just as a side note: A 2.53GHz Xeon X5540 costs more than two 2.26GHz X5520's. There's diminishing returns, and then there's Intel's server pricing structure...
Since the nice 2.66GHz Xeon 3500 servers I wanted are a non-starter (thanks SuperMicro, you weenies), I'm looking at dual-processor boxes. They'll cost more, but of course they'll deliver more. But the affordable processor models are the slower end of the range, so we're looking at 2GHz or maybe 2.26GHz. (But we'll have two of them per server, each quad core and hyperthreaded, so 16 virtual cores.)
Once I get pricing (soon, I hope), I'll twist the arm of the friendly sales people a bit and order the new boxes.
Just as a side note: A 2.53GHz Xeon X5540 costs more than two 2.26GHz X5520's. There's diminishing returns, and then there's Intel's server pricing structure...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:02 PM
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