[olug] Intense PC - the most powerful miniature fanless PC EVER!

[Carl Lundstedt]

Hey,
We need lights out, pre-OS level remote management on our servers for
quick, large scale deploys and remote maintenance.  If you're going to
start throwing in serial stuff and KVMs than the price benefit gets
eaten up pretty quick.  We also use our number cruncher nodes for
storage as well, so form factor matters to us.

As for porting...it's an unmitigated nightmare to move our CMS software
base to the latest RHEL release, let alone another hardware platform.
Right now we're having to run CMS jobs in a RHEL 5 chroot jail on our
RHEL 6 machines as the code base has not been certified for RHEL6.  

I know it was put forth as a funny, but there are reasons FNAL/UNL/CMS
could not move to something like this.  (Perhaps the detector trigger on
CMS could use something like this, but it takes years to design
triggering for large experiments and we can't change out the trigger
mid-stream and hope to be taken seriously.)
Carl

On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 11:58 -0600, Ben Watson wrote:
> Define "remote console functionality".  I imagine you could dedicate
> one or more of the Pis to host an XServer thereby allowing you remote
> desktop access (e.g. via VNC).  Or you could SSH into the cluster head
> or any of the cluster nodes.
> 
> There are currently many projects devoting development cycles to
> porting stuff to the Pi.  Fedora Remix and XBMC come to mind.  I can
> see the likes of Debian, Ubuntu, Android, etc. following suit.
> 
> Ben
> 
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Carl Lundstedt
> <clundst at unlserve.unl.edu> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 09:22 -0800, Kevin D. Snodgrass wrote:
> >>
> >> > From: Ben Watson <bwatson1979 at gmail.com>
> >> >
> >> > So I was just thinking, for the speculated price of the Intense PC, I
> >> > could probably purchase 13-20 Raspberry Pi machines.  Granted the
> >> > combined power draw of this many Pis would be more than the Intense
> >> > PC, but I wonder if you could get better overall number crunching
> >> > performance in some sort of Pi cluster/grid.
> >>
> >> Image the people that sell the Raspberry getting an order for 100K devices from FermiLab or Sandia or ....
> >>
> >> :-)
> > It's a nice thought, but Fermilab servers need to have remote console
> > functionality to even get out of the gate (much like what we need down
> > here for our CERN/CMS cluster).
> >
> > Our CERN collegues at U. of Colorado might go for them.  They built a
> > cluster out of motherboards mounted on plexiglass and power supply
> > sharing.  It was a frightening thing to see.
> >
> > Carl Lundstedt
> > UNL
> >
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