On Sat, 14 Jul 2007, Alan Robertson wrote:
a random collection of mostly old cast-off computers. They range
between 300mhz and 2.4 ghz, and have disks ranging from
5200 to 7200 RPM with significantly different seek times.
Some support DMA, and I believe some of them don't, and the
amount of RAM also varies.
This particular cluster is head-and-shoulders above "normal"
clusters in finding timing problems. On a few occasions
it wouldn't even run 10 iterations without several problems
popping up - on a version where another cluster had run
well over 5000 tests flawlessly. When this first happened
there were quite a few harsh words exchanged, until we
figured out that it wasn't the diligence of the tester,
it was just the cluster doing the testing.
how long does an iteration take on this cluster?
To our experience, if our tests run flawlessly on these two clusters,
they will run flawlessly on the "good" clusters.
As a result, I put in a good bit of my time and some of my money into
keeping this crappy old cluster going, and paying for the power to keep
it on - because it's incredibly valuable to the project. For reasons we
don't completely understand, it has a (so far) unique role in finding
timing problems. All the developers on the project have easy access to
this cluster, just check with me to make sure I'm not using it.
I have a number of surplus rack-mount computers available if anyone is
interested in duplicating or if Alan is interested in expanding this cluster.
it would be great if somthing like the auto-build system could feed into a
cluster like this for automated testing (I don't know if there would be enough
testing with nightly builds, but periodic tested builds would be more valuble
then just the nightly builds)
the systems I have available for such a project are:
1. cobalt 1u appliance boxes, ~300mhz, 128M ram, 10G hard drives, 2x100Mb on
motherboard, 1 PCI card (containing a 2x100Mb ethernet card), no video or
keyboard
2. racksaver 2-in-1 systems. two complete systems in a long 2u case, each system
is power supply, motherboard 512MB ram, floppy, CD burner, 40G+ IDE hard drive,
4-8x100Mb, video, keyboard, 2xRS232. the processors on these vary from 1GHz to
1800+ Athlons (both CPU's in one case will probably be the same)
3. a limited number of 2u dual Athlon 2000+ systems with SCSI RAID controllers
(I'm short on drives, but can come up with a handful of 10k, and possibly a
couple 15K drives)
any interst from anyone for this?
David Lang
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