Prev: When will Solaris 11 come out?
Next: sccli: no manageable devices found
From: Dave on 22 Nov 2009 19:21
Chris Cox wrote:
> ITguy wrote:
>>> Thank you. That is out of my price range. Is there anything quicker than a Blade
>>> 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.
>
> 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...

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


--
I respectfully request that this message is not archived by companies as
unscrupulous as 'Experts Exchange' . In case you are unaware,
'Experts Exchange' take questions posted on the web and try to find
idiots stupid enough to pay for the answers, which were posted freely
by others. They are leeches.
From: Chris Cox on 22 Nov 2009 19:46
Dave wrote:
....
> 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).
From: Canuck57 on 22 Nov 2009 21:35
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
>
> 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
>
> http://www.sagemath.org/
>
> 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.

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.
From: Sami Ketola on 23 Nov 2009 01:59
Dave <foo(a)coo.com> wrote:
> 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

From: David Kirkby on 23 Nov 2009 08:55
On Nov 23, 2:35 am, Canuck57 <Canuc...(a)nospam.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> >http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/N....
>
> > 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
>
> >http://www.sagemath.org/
>
> > 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.
>
> 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.

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.
First  |  Prev  |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Prev: When will Solaris 11 come out?
Next: sccli: no manageable devices found