On Friday, March 10, 2023, Paul Wise <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 2023-03-09 at 11:05 +0100, Mathieu Malaterre wrote: > >> I vaguely remember someone mentioning a service where one could ssh >> onto ppc64el machines. I need access to a POWER10 machine to track a >> bug. platti.d.o is POWER8 AFAIK. > > This page has the canonical list of available hardware resources, > including both Debian and external resources, including POWER: > > https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Wanted#Available_hardware > > Not sure if any of these are POWER10, but the IBM link might.
i've been tracking these for over a year, the list price remains at USD 100,000, non-negotiable. people even in Europe are actually paying that but the number of people then publicly offering access to them for FOSS is as rare as rocking-horse s***. translation: REALLY, in the next 2 to 5 years hell will freeze over before a random company outside of IBM themselves gives FOSS developers access to a POWER10 system. you drop a hundred grand on a single server, ya damn well gonna squeeze every last penny out of it for profit, y'ken! can i strongly suggest lining up a group of FOSS developers right across the entire FOSS Community to systematically bang on and on incessantly and extremely politely to IBM in as many forums as possible in as many ways as possible without ceasing until IBM gets the message that if they want FOSS to actually exist in the future POWER community they bloody well better give FOSS developers access to POWER10. the only serious problem with that though is the machines are so insanely goddamn powerful that there is a serious risk of misuse. i heard on the grapevine for example that postgresql's memory-resident torture tests which normally take several minutes were finished within seconds. these are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more powerful than any piddling f*****g wannab x86 or ARM server when it comes to memory and IO bandwidth and coherency (shared L1 L2 and L3 caches across half a MILLION machines is possible). so please you have to bear in mind the context here that these machines are still making various TLAs have kittens, ok? even having access to one is going to get you on half a dozen watchlists across the world. l. -- --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
