Question: I have a dual Xeon 8c/16t (total of 32t) ESXi server. I am only using like 6t at present. If I create a 16 thread Linux VM to run boinc, will it put out numbers that are worth the effort?
I really wish there was a way to do WCG on the idle cores of an ESXi server.
Just for those that are curious, the system is a dual E5-2660 with 128GB of RAM. Only using 5 or 6 cores and less than 20GB of RAM, so wondering if this might be worth the effort...
Last edited by josh1980; 10-10-2014 at 10:34 PM.
I can offer you 3 rigs as a point of reference
1. a single processor with the same specs as yours that runs windows and does a bunch of other stuff as it is my daily rig: http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?p...hostid=2574664
2. a duallie with with the same specs as yours that runs Linux Mint and does Very little else but crunch using an Asus board and 32GB of normal 1600 ram: http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?p...hostid=2408756
2. a duallie with with the same specs as yours that runs Linux Mint and does Very little else but crunch using a Supermicro board and 16GB of ecc 1600 ram: http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?p...hostid=2418906
When I say same specs as yours, mine are es cpus that are base 2.3 but full turbo is 2.4 which I believe is the same.
I am not sure what the effect will be of running a VM. My personal experience in the past has only been with VirtualBox where the gains of running Linux were eaten into by running the VM.
Last edited by OldChap; 10-11-2014 at 01:16 AM.
My Biggest Fear Is When I die, My Wife Sells All My Stuff For What I Told Her I Paid For It.79 SB threads and 32 IB Threads across 4 rigs 111 threads Crunching!!
Some UNIX/Linux humor.
And the funniest of all....
After reading the books I can believe he'd say that.Originally Posted by PoppaGeek
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
So I was wondering if the Linux gurus/Linuxphiles have an opinion on what are the best brands and/or models of laptops to put Linux on. In terms of full functionality without any quirks in audio, touchpad/mouse, etc? I've only used Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon on a dual core Toshiba.
Desktop rigs:
Oysterhead- Intel i5-2320 CPU@3.0Ghz, Zalman 9500AT2, 8Gb Patriot 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM, 120Gb Kingston V200+ SSD, 1Tb Seagate HD, Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon 64 bit, LG 330W PSU
Flying Frog Brigade-Intel Xeon W3520@2.66Ghz, 6Gb Hynix 1066Mhz DDR3 RAM, 640Gb Hitachi HD, 512Mb GDDR5 AMD HD4870, Mac OSX 10.6.8/Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon dual boot
Laptop:
Colonel Claypool-Intel T6600 Core 2 Duo, 4Gb 1066Mhz DDR3 RAM, 1Gb GDDR3 Nvidia 230M,240Gb Edge SATA6 SSD, Windows 7 Home 64 bit
I bought a Dell Inspiron M5040 from my daughter when she lost her job. Put Mint 17 on it and have been surprised and pleased how well it works. Snappy. I a SSD in it and it comess out of hibernation very quickly. Everything works. I know in the past Dell has supported Linux and from what I have seen it is still working well.
I know Lenovos worked well with Linux when IBM had them. Do not know about now.
I would Google the make and model along with distro and see if others are complaining or looking for help.
I installed LM17 on an Inspiron 1545. It seemed to work just fine, but the guy I installed it for is complaining about freezes and cursor problems. Never had any problems with LM14 on my Toshiba. I had Ubuntu on a Lenovo T400 and that worked fine, though I hated the GUI on Ubuntu.
Yes I know I can Google and I am doing so. However I'd rather have some input from people who know their poop vs. some person who thinks he knows what he is doing and doesn't e.g. Mac forums
Desktop rigs:
Oysterhead- Intel i5-2320 CPU@3.0Ghz, Zalman 9500AT2, 8Gb Patriot 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM, 120Gb Kingston V200+ SSD, 1Tb Seagate HD, Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon 64 bit, LG 330W PSU
Flying Frog Brigade-Intel Xeon W3520@2.66Ghz, 6Gb Hynix 1066Mhz DDR3 RAM, 640Gb Hitachi HD, 512Mb GDDR5 AMD HD4870, Mac OSX 10.6.8/Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon dual boot
Laptop:
Colonel Claypool-Intel T6600 Core 2 Duo, 4Gb 1066Mhz DDR3 RAM, 1Gb GDDR3 Nvidia 230M,240Gb Edge SATA6 SSD, Windows 7 Home 64 bit
I like to Google to see if there are any discussions about the item. If not I assume no problems, if there are complaints and no fixes I move on to something else. Sometimes it is obvious the person is clueless and I discount it unless there are others also complaining.
I was not blowing you off. It is what I do when looking at hardware.
A short excerpt of Linus Torvalds reason for not using Debian. The point here I want to show is not what distro to use, I like Debian, but just because you know something really well in UNIX/Linux, even as the inventor and maintainer of the Linux kernel does not mean you know or are good at everything. I like to say "I know what I don't know".
Why Linus Torvalds doesn't use Ubuntu or Debian
He mentions something important that I do myself. All the Linux machines I have here, at least those that run a desktop environment, all run the same distro and version. Even the server rigs use the same back end specifically because it allows me to use the same commands across all of them which saves me time and effort. I also use a little thing called ClusterSSH, which lets me type a command once and it sends that to all the currently connected machines at the same time. Very handy when you're administering a lot of nodes or a crunching farm and need to do exactly the same thing to all of them.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Wish my life had been so simple. At one time I was sole admin for:
2 FreeBSD firewalls
1 Redhat email server
1 Mandrake FTP server
2 SCO boxes
3 Sun Solars app and DB servers
2 Sun Solaris sandbox servers
1 NT terminal server with bank of modems
1 Cisco 2501 IIRC
2 Large Sun disk arrays
2 Sun tape backup boxes using Veritas
whatever Windows XP machine when Windows admin was out.
And at one time I used a FreeBSD box with 2 NICs set in promiscuous or monitor mode and a traffic sniffer so I could see traffic coming and going on the network. Saved traffic to large hard drive and then used ethereal or something similar to look for bad traffic.
It was love/hate. Would be at a prompt and trying to remember the subtle, small difference a command switch was in Solaris after trying the FreeBSD out of habit. All the UNIX and Linux boxes were 98% the same at the command prompt for the commands I commonly used. It was forever frustrating trying to remember that 2%. But there were things I liked about each one and I loved the work more than even at IBM or the ISP I worked at. The ISP was all Solaris and IBM was AIX and Solaris. I respect all the UNIX/Linux OSes I worked on. Each has it's strength and weaknesses.
Too old for that crap now. I have Ubuntu on 2 servers and laptop and one desktop, Mint on a laptop and desktop. They are similar enough to be the same to me. I still do almost everything from the command line. Easier for me than going through menus looking for the name or icon if there is even one for what I want. At one time my web was text based and email was text based. Lynx and Pine. Loved Pine. Even a quad cpu machine at 75mz is snappy if it is all text.
Someday i may document the online battle I got into with someone who had hacked into an ISP server and gotten root. It was a trip. An adrenalin rush like crazy. I won but have no idea how long we were at it. Time was irrelevant things were happening so fast.
Well ... there is another machine I have that's running a different distro to the rest, though it's close enough for admin purposes.
At one point I was running Ubuntu (Gnome 2 desktop) on the kids' machines, Mint (XFCE desktop) on my netbook, Slackware (XFCE desktop) on my desktop and Backtrack (Gnome 2) on the notebook. These days I'm down to Mint (XFCE) on most things and Kali on the notebook.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Slackware was my first distro. Had to make floppies from a CDRom. Was like 22 of them. Installed it to a 486. Maybe 400mz????? 512 meg of ram?? Sound about right? Since my previous machine was a 200mz with 128 meg ram sounds reasonable. Kernel .99. In those days it was like bare knuckle brawling. Wusses did not need to try. X was configured via editing a text file as was dial up modem using PPP. Ah the good old days. NOT. I like it better now except back then you had to learn now you really do not.
Liked Gnome 2 too. Simple although nested branching menus could get tedious.
EDIT: loving old age. 486 was 25-100mz. so guessing it was before the Pentium 1XX. Maybe I should just stop talking.
Last edited by PoppaGeek; 11-20-2014 at 09:50 PM.
Just to give you an idea how far I go back, my 2nd computer was an IBM 386 with micro architecture. Ran a BBS on it. MostlyEDIT: loving old age. 486 was 25-100mz. so guessing it was before the Pentium 1XX. Maybe I should just stop talking.and a few games. Those were the days.
2 words. Dialup modem. Or is that 3? Anyway I remember being excited going from 300 baud to 1200 baud and being jealous of the guy on my BBS that had a 9600. Don't remember what he paid for it but it was more than I paid for my Apple 2. OK maybe not more but it was a lot more than I could spend. Dang was it fast. Everyone thought U.S. Robotics would rule the net! Are they even still around?Just to give you an idea how far I go back, my 2nd computer was an IBM 386 with micro architecture. Ran a BBS on it. Mostly
Yep, do have some good memories.
If I told you I still have a 12" green monitor.... or that I paid GBP140 for a replacement 2 x speed CD drive......
My Biggest Fear Is When I die, My Wife Sells All My Stuff For What I Told Her I Paid For It.79 SB threads and 32 IB Threads across 4 rigs 111 threads Crunching!!
The first PC game I ever played was Doom. Bought a Creative Blaster Media kit. 2x CDrom, sound card and 2 of the crapiest speakers known to man. My smartphone has a better speaker than they did. Then spent a day learning how to load drivers into high memory on a Dos machine so there would be enough free memory to run Doom. But I ended up playing all the iD games, Doom and Quake, Heretic and Hexen and buying every CD of expansions that came out. I was an addict. Neighbors were terrified by all the screams and explosions coming from those crappy little speakers.
When I got my 14,400 US robotics modem (started at 300), I was in heaven. Remember programming in ASCI? Did allot to customize my BBS. Wife was pissed I spent so much time running the BBS. Then I got shipped to Germany. Got into war gaming with software from SSI. Was an addict. Quit gaming for a long time after I retired from the army until I got hooked on World of Tanks. My new passion.2 words. Dialup modem. Or is that 3? Anyway I remember being excited going from 300 baud to 1200 baud and being jealous of the guy on my BBS that had a 9600. Don't remember what he paid for it but it was more than I paid for my Apple 2. OK maybe not more but it was a lot more than I could spend. Dang was it fast. Everyone thought U.S. Robotics would rule the net! Are they even still around?
Yep, do have some good memories.
I am kinda addicted to Elder Scrolls Online right now. Loved Oblivion and Skyrim so feels pretty comfortable. Do not have the energy I used to though so no more 14-18 hour sessions. Maybe 3-5 at best.
The old BBS days were good. Small communities, usually, around similar interests. Mine was mostly around firearms and shooting. But also carried UUCP Newsgroups as per request. Did not have the bandwidth or disk space for a full load. But would carry anything that was not p0rn, hate or warez. Still keep in touch with one of the members. I ran Proline BBS on an Apple 2. Was all command line and had a subset of Unix commands that supported the BBS and UUCP for newgroups. Was my first exposure to Unix/Posix system. Although it was not Unix at all. Just worked like it. Was Apple. Pretty cool.
I ran PCBoard. It was interesting. When some guys in the next town started running multiple lines, started losing folks to the point I shut it down. There's was a paid subscription, multi games and news feeds. When I came back from germany in 95, tried to do it again on an apple system but the net was in full swing. It was fun while it lasted.
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