Fast cheap SPARC hardware.
Dave
(say under �500) used?
I have a Blade 2000 (2 x 1.2 GHz),
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/sunblade2000/
and will no doubt at some point find someone putting a Blade 2500 (2 x 1.6 GHz)
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/sunblade2500/
on eBay at a price they might actually get for it, rather than what they might
hope to get. But are there SPARC options I'm overlooking?
I recently had a Sun Netra T1
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/Netra_t1_105/Netra_t1_105
destroyed by lightning, and my insurers gave me to money to replace it with a
SPARC based T1000
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/
which I note is just EOL, though it was not a couple of months back.
But I know the single threaded performance of a T1000 is going to be worst than
the Blade 2000 and in any case, a mate gave me another Netra T1.
But the performance of that is pretty poor - *much* worst than the Blade 2000.
But at only 60 W of power, I do not mind keeping the T1 on 24/7.
I'm just wondering if there are any other models (either server or workstation),
I've overlooked. The 2.52-GHz Sun M3000 Casper mentioned would be nice, but
that's not cheap.
Ideally a server which I could remotely switch on/off would be nice. Then I
could stuff it in the garage and not hear it. But I'm not too fussed about that.
Just something cheap and with better signle threaded performance than the Blade
2000.
I have an Ultra 27, but I spend some of my spare time working on the Sage project
and want to improve the Solaris SPARC support. (It seems a bit silly, as I will
probably never use Sage on SPARC myself much, but I started helping, and do not
intend stopping now).
I have remote (across the Atlantic) access to a Sun SPARC T5240, but the single
threaded performance of that is very poor. My Blade 2000 is much quicker than
the T5240, despite being several years older and worth only < 5% the price of a
T5240.
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Sami Ketola
> Are there any options for fast single threaded SPARC hardware at a cheap price
>
Fastest Single-threaded UltraSPARC processors are the SPARC-VII+ processors
that you get in the M-series chassis. Cheapest of them all is the M3000.
Sami
Dave
2500, but cheaper than the M3000 ?
ITguy
> 2500, but cheaper than the M3000 ?
The most recent SPARC workstations, including the Blade 2500, are all
based on SPARC-III chips which are rather slow. If you need good
single threaded SPARC performance at lowest cost I'd look at the SPARC-
IV based systems. I believe the Sun Fire V490 was the smallest/
cheapest of the bunch.
Chris Cox
I would say this as well... And... you could find them used for cheap
potentially. But nothing new.
You can find decent V490's for around $3000USD used. There are some
for less... and they'll be faster than your SB 2000 as well.
If you're fortunate you'll find one that is relatively cheap with
some IV+ inside.
Best deal potentially on ebay is one with 4x1.35 IV's in it with 16G
for about $2600USD. I see a V890 with 2x1.35's for $1550USD.
That's not bad...
Like all non-cool thread contemporary Suns... they pull about
as much power as THE Sun :-)
Dave
Thank you for the suggestions.
> Like all non-cool thread contemporary Suns... they pull about
> as much power as THE Sun :-)
Not all of them, as there is the Blade 2500, which looks like a perpetual motion
machine from the specs.
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/SunBlade2500S/spec
Environment
AC input 90 to 264 VAC, 47 to 63 Hz, 0.4 KVA
DC Output 600 W
Chris Cox
...
> Not all of them, as there is the Blade 2500, which looks like a
> perpetual motion machine from the specs.
>
> http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/SunBlade2500S/spec
>
>
> Environment
> AC input 90 to 264 VAC, 47 to 63 Hz, 0.4 KVA
> DC Output 600 W
Well.. you really have to measure it. For example, my new 2xX5550 Intel
box with 12G never draws more than 140W (never). 600W is huge. But
I'm sure it doesn't draw that much. It's just has the capability.
With that said, I bet it draws more than 140W... and a cheapo
Core2 duo will run circles around it.
And it all depends on how fast you want things to go. The 2500 just
want be nearly as fast as having 4 UltraSPARC IV's (the V490 should
be at least 2x, possibly 4x faster).
Canuck57
Why not run Solaris on commodity Intel or AMD processor? Maybe even in
a desktop VM? Say Vista Windblows with VirtualBox set to 2 procs.
Any code for SageMath should be portable, and shouldn't be an issue.
Use the over seas one just for testing.
I have a V100, but haven't given it power in two years.
Sami Ketola
> Thank you. That is out of my price range. Is there anything quicker than a Blade
> 2500, but cheaper than the M3000 ?
Ultra-45 and Sun Blade 2500 both have the UltraSPARC-IIIi processors that
run 1.6GHz. They're both at your price range on ebay and such. Then there is
Sun Fire V245 that came with 1.5GHz processors at best. Again UltraSPARC-IIIi.
Sami
David Kirkby
> Dave wrote:
> > Are there any options for fast single threaded SPARC hardware at a cheap
> > price (say under £500) used?
>
> > I have a Blade 2000 (2 x 1.2 GHz),
>
> >http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/sunblade2000/
>
> > and will no doubt at some point find someone putting a Blade 2500 (2 x
> > 1.6 GHz)
>
> >http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/sunblade2500/
>
> > on eBay at a price they might actually get for it, rather than what they
> > might hope to get. But are there SPARC options I'm overlooking?
>
> > I recently had a Sun Netra T1
>
Thank you, but I have an Ultra 27 running OpenSolaris. There are many
reasons Sage will not build on OpenSolaris - I want to fix them, but
first I want to fix the few remaining SPARC issues which make
installation a bit of a pain on SPARC.
I might try installing Solaris 10 (not OpenSolaris) as a guest
operating system in VirtualBox on my Ultra 27. That might be semi-
useful, but I suspect that will cause its own set of problems. For
example, some code acts differently if the processor is x86. Some of
the issues I've hit have in fact been specific to the sun4v
(Coolthreads) platform. First there was the fact ATLAS has no tuning
parameters for sun4v. Then a bug in ATLAS was only seen on sun4v. Then
a bug in memset(), which Sun have since fixed, caused a problem only
on sun4v. I do not believe testing on Solaris 10 on x86 will be
particulary useful.
I really need to get a faster SPARC platform.
Mark
> I really need to get a faster SPARC platform.
Sadly, I think your post title could be used as a classic example of
IT compromise :
"Fast, cheap, and SPARC". Pick any two...
:(
-Mark
Richard B. Gilbert
ISTR that the original of this was known as the "Truman Triangle"^1 and
read Fast, Cheap, and Good.
1. Truman, Harry S. 1884-1972
Paul Floyd
>
> Why not run Solaris on commodity Intel or AMD processor? Maybe even in
> a desktop VM? Say Vista Windblows with VirtualBox set to 2 procs.
Hi
For a project like this, there are likely to be issues with numerical
precision on all platforms. This will be a particular problem if 32bit
x86 is a target, but there will also be inconsistencies between SPARC
and amd64. If identical results are required on all platforms, then all
platforms will need to be used and tested.
Of course, it'd be possible to do the bulk of the development on one
platform (like a fast amd64) and just do builds and tests on the slow
(SPARC).
A bientot
Paul
--
Paul Floyd http://paulf.free.fr
David Kirkby
I must admit, I'd not really thought about running Solaris 10 on the
x86 hardware. Certainly OpenSolaris on x86 present many issues, that
prevent Sage buiiding at all. For example
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7387
shows a linking error which occurs on OpenSolaris (x86) but not on
Solaris 10 (SPARC).. I think this one is due to the fact that Sage
ships a library which gets built on OpenSolaris, and Sun ship the same
(or similar) library, so the linker complains about linking in both of
them. One Solaris 10 (SPARC) Sun do not ship the libraries, so this is
not an issue. I will certainly give Solaris 10 (x86) a try as a
virtual machine on my Sun Ultra 27. Numerical rounding erros just have
to be accepted. If people want higher precision, there are libraries
in Sage which compute things to millions of digits. Of course, such
opperations are a lot slower than using a hardware floating point
processor.
I suspect though, I'll probably just have to use my Blade 2000. It is
at least a usable speed - the T5240 is just too damm slow for what I'm
using it for.
I find testing on multiple platforms uncovers bugs that tend to be
missed on one platform. I even test some of the stuff on HP-UX, though
there are no plans for an officlal port to HP-UX.
Dave
Barry OGrady
wrote:
I have Solaris 10 running on a Sunfire X1100 which has a dual core
2.4Ghz AMD Opteron, with 2G RAM and 2x80G SATA hard drives, and it
didn't cost very much.
=-=-=
Barry
http://members.iinet.net.au/~barry.og
Tim Bradshaw
> "Fast, cheap, and SPARC". Pick any two...
Well, US IV and US IV+ machines ought to be appearing on the
second-hand market now or very soon. Lots of people will be doing
power-reduction exercises moving from these things to T-series systems.
Canuck57
> In article <qxmOm.63288$Xf2....@newsfe12.iad>,
> to run on Sparc systems? AFAIK, he's already got Intel boxes. He wants
> a Sparc development platform, or did you miss that part of the thread?
You missed the point. If he develops on Solaris Intel, it should run on
Sparc just fine. I it is C code, just compile, test and run on Sparc.
Then have code that works on both.
If it is Java, no need... it will run.
The only real must have Sparc is for drivers and to the metal work. For
applications, you don't need to have a Sparc chip. Fork(), pthread..()
all work the same. If doing byte work and network packet stuff, learn
up on methods like htons() to get started, which is a good practice when
writing C/C++ and network stuff anyway.
Canuck57
I worked on some M4100's (??) or something like that once. Not too
expensive and had AMD inside. I was impressed at how quick they were.
It was a network cluster type app, and I developed it inside of VMWare
on a laptop, and just moved it to the systems. Worked well. Never even
laid eyes on them as I was 1600 miles away, just used a serial console
and jumpstarted them off a local Sparc with the x86 image.
Richard L. Hamilton
You could probably get remote access to a suitable system cheaper than
you could buy one. There are companies that will make zones on big
systems available for rent, as it were.
Dave
Actually, I have solved this now, if I substitute 'cheap' for 'free' Dennis
Clark of Blastwave has offered me access to a dual 1.6 GHz SPARC for free.
Dave