Letting everyone know that I am currently going through the process of trying to procure some dedicated hardware for Pekko, this is being done for two main reasons
* Provide deterministic resources for our nightly tests (i.e. https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/blob/main/.github/workflows/nightly-builds.yml and https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/blob/main/.github/workflows/nightly-builds-aeron.yml) so we don’t have to deal with the noisy neighbour problem. With a dedicated machine we can also use technologies like LXC/Docker with bespoke CPU/memory resources for specific tests to simulate/test Pekko under constrained conditions. * Also provide a machine that can be used for benchmarking which naturally requires dedicated hardware. I am currently thinking of this as a nice to have since dedicated machines are only one piece of the problem (i.e. if you want to have really accurate benchmarks then you also need to do things like disable turboing of clocks but at least having a dedicated machine is a good starting point). Thankfully in today's day and age, such dedicated hardware is not that expensive and so I am in the process of writing a proposal within the company where I work (Aiven) to sponsor the hardware. Naturally such an endeavour raises questions. To start off with for those who are not aware we are not alone with this, it’s not uncommon for companies to sponsor hardware for Apache projects (Ververica is an example of an external company which provides hardware for Apache Flink). The point of bringing this up is to indicate this has been done before, and specifically in our case because we are using GitHub actions there is already a wiki article on the technical details at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/GitHub+self-hosted+runners. Do note that while the wiki does raise specific security concerns in our case the dedicated machine will not run on PR’s, instead it's going to run nightly on the main branch which only contains code that has been approved (since main is protected) and wrt possible future benchmarking this would likely be triggered by a GitHub bot that would only respond to committers (in the case we want to run a benchmark on specific PR’s to see that there isn’t a performance regression). There are other questions such as securing the machine itself and how to integrate this within Apache’s both structurally and organisationally (amongst others), these questions will be asked in the upcoming Infrastructure Round Table this Wednesday. -- Matthew de Detrich *Aiven Deutschland GmbH* Immanuelkirchstraße 26, 10405 Berlin Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 209739 B Geschäftsführer: Oskari Saarenmaa & Hannu Valtonen *m:* +491603708037 *w:* aiven.io *e:* matthew.dedetr...@aiven.io
