cheap high perf HW

Thomas Waldmann @ EuroPython 2018

moar power wanted!

• have a powerful development machine
• test on all operating systems / platforms:
  • linux, BSDs, macOS, OpenIndiana, Windows
  • test on misc. releases of these
  • 64 bit and maybe some 32bit also
  • little endian and big endian (e.g. ppc qemu)
  • use vagrant and VMs on a powerful machine
• experiment with multi-server setups using VMs

used workstation / server

• workstation class hardware is usually rather expensive (2K - 10K EUR) -- except when you buy refurbished!
• workstation:
  • high performance PC for workplace, Tower
  • few disks, many PCIe slots, may be quiet
• server:
  • rather for computing center, 19" rack mount
  • many disks, PCIe slots?, may be loud
• often better build quality than PC hardware
• find the sweet performance / price spot:
  • might be ivy bridge (4yo) or
  • sandy bridge (5yo)
  • (as of 2018, subject to change...)

DELL T3610

DELL T3610 Mainboard

DELL T7610 Mainboard

CPUs

• S2011(-0) machines come for 1, 2, 4 Xeon CPUs
• Ivy Bridge "E5-[124]6xx v2" Xeons (~4yo):
  • price new, back then:  ~ 250 .. 2500 EUR
  • price used, now:  ~ 20 .. 400 EUR
  • few cores, highest clock (4c 3.7 GHz, 6c 3.5 GHz)
  • medium cores, high clock (8c 3.3 GHz)
  • many cores, medium clock (12c 2.7 GHz)
  • check CPU cache size, it's important
• Sandy Bridge "v1" Xeons (~5yo) even cheaper
• S2011 Xeons take DDR3 ECC/reg memory DIMMs

CPU: Xeon E5-2667v2

RAM, lots of it!

• DDR4 is expensive right now (>10EUR/GB)
• used DDR3 ECC/reg is cheap (<2.5EUR/GB)
• used servers and workstations take DDR3 ECC/reg
  (you can not use ECC/reg memory in a normal PC)
• S2011-0:
  • 4 RAM channels per CPU
  • 8+ DIMM sockets per CPU
  • so 64, 128 or more GB are possible / affordable
• ECC is nice, no worries about undetected / uncorrected memory errors

RAM: DDR3 ECC/reg.

SSDs

• older machines need a SATA device to boot
• for a higher performance extra device, use:
  • a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot to M.2 NVME adapter card
  • a fast M.2 PCIe NVME SSDs (like Samsung Pro 970)
  • great for vagrant, docker or other busy FS
  • workstations usually have quite some PCIe slots with many PCIe lanes (unlike PC hw)
• for even more performance, there are:
  • PCIe 3.0 x16 slot to 4x M.2 NVME adapter cards
  • but they require PCIe bifurcation support in BIOS and hardware (so x16 slot == x4 x4 x4 x4)
  • this is rare and often badly documented

SSDs: M.2 NVME PCIe x4

Power consumption

• Recent CPUs are better with power saving
  (but new machines are expensive / need DDR4).
• Ivy Bridge is already decent (22nm), while
• Sandy Bridge draws more power for less performance
  (32nm).

• If you need it 24/7 on, newer is maybe better.
• If you need it now and then, doesn't matter much.
• Use Wake-on-LAN (WoL) to power it on when needed, even from remote (ssh).
   
• high TDP, high load = hot and loud

Laptops

• refurbished workstation class laptops
• e.g. Lenovo Thinkpads (W or P series)
• there are some 4core machines (Xeon or i7-xxxxQM)
• workstation laptops might have 4 DIMM sockets,
  so usually up to 32GB with DDR3.
• usually only SATA SSDs here except for very recent machines.