Nekochan Net

yes, 3.0 HT netbursts, but I'm surprised on the cooling and power requirements (or lack of it) in the DL560.

Quad 3.0's with 6GB DDR and 2x73GB U320 consumes according to my power socket meter approx. 235W (and this from Dual 550W/650W PSU units).

235W isn't a lot.

Cooling is via 8 fans at the front in two rows and with power management software (RHEL5 extensions) the box is very little difference in loudness from a power desktop and I mean that... it simply is a quiet beast - quieter than a single core P4 XEON 2.6 equipped Dell 1750 1U server or a Dual CPU Sun V210 1U.

I know that on the whole 2U are quieter than 1U due to to the constraints in cooling a 1U requiring more powerful fans, but still, it is quiet... and power requirements aren't at all bad.

I'm not sure how an Athlon 64 would outperform overall (computationally and heavy load I/O) a Quad HT box (thats 8x3GHZ HT cores). I'm using most of those cores daily and the box as I said is handling a nice load very well.

For under $200 I assume (for an entire unit) you mean a Dual Core Athlon 64? May be you are right... never tried... 64-bit is tempting though simply because hiphop is a real issue compiling on a 32-bit box and hiphop would be very useful for me at the moment.

Also I'm in the UK, nothing is cheap here, in the US on ebay stuff is often 50% of the UK price... or less....

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"Scud" East
Sun Blade 2500 'Silver' Workstation - Dual 1.6 USIIIi, 4GB, 146GB SCSI, Solaris 10U9
Sun V210, 2x1.33 USIIIi, 8GB, 73GB 15K, Solaris 10U9
Sun V100, USIIi 550, 1.5GB, 40GB, Debian Lenny 5.X

I picked up a dl560 from ebay as well, and it showed up today. What a beast!

I was wondering what software you were using for controlling the fans?

Edit: Never mind found it. Wow does that ever make a difference!

Thanks
Aaron

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Octane
Sun Ultra 60
Sun Netra x 2
DL560 4x2Ghz Xeon 5GB

Just saw this better late than never... but for anyone else...

CentOS or RHEL is the only real OS for this box due to the fact that the RHEL extensions for power management manage the fans superbly (and make the machine pretty quiet). I suspect any other Linux Derivative would not have these Redhat developed extensions and the machine would just be hugely noisy and power hungry.

The RHEL extensions run without any issue under CentOS of course. I think it was the OS of choice for these servers.

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"Scud" East
Sun Blade 2500 'Silver' Workstation - Dual 1.6 USIIIi, 4GB, 146GB SCSI, Solaris 10U9
Sun V210, 2x1.33 USIIIi, 8GB, 73GB 15K, Solaris 10U9
Sun V100, USIIi 550, 1.5GB, 40GB, Debian Lenny 5.X

I have a limited amount of academic exposure to computer architecture and microprocessor design theory, but I'll just mention a few things that came to mind while reading this thread:

First, congrats! The Proliant line is a very reliable and well-built family of otherwise boring x86 servers. I've never had hardware trouble with any of my Proliants, although the ILO software can be a PITA at times.

Second, on a single-threaded program you may or may not see linear improvements in execution time by changing the CPU. There are a number of factors to account for here. A big one is cache size - bigger cache = less clock cycles spent fetching. Floating-point performance also varies between processor families.

I think the best thing you could do at at this point is to parallelize your operations across the entire CPU. Perhaps divide and conquer with your dataset to utilize the unused threads?

Are you working with a fixed data set? If so, is it necessary to constantly regenerate it? How large is the data set, and what type of operations take so long?

Also, have you used a profiler to find if there are any bottlenecks in your program? Have you used the "htop" utility to watch your CPU core usage?

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Debian GNU/Linux on a Thinkpad, running a simple setup with FVWM.