20th of March

Farm status
CPU only
Off

Nvidia GPUs
Two doing Einstein, weather permitting

Raspberry Pis
Nine Pi4's running Einstein.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Storage server update
In my last post I mentioned I was looking at updating the storage servers. I gave up looking for a Xeon E-2300 and instead have ordered an ASUS X570-Pro motherboard, Ryzen 5600X CPU and a Noctua cooler. I'll move PCIe cards from the old machine and I have memory. The Xeon E-2300 series and the Ryzen both have a 128GB memory limit, the difference is I can get the Ryzen and its cheaper.

I went with the Pro motherboard as it gives an extra M.2 slot and an extra PCIe x16 slot over the X570-P motherboard. I need to add a graphics card to the machine which only leaves 2 PCIe slots left for the SAS controller and 10GbE network card.

I tested 32GB ECC memory sticks in an X570-P machine (with a Ryzen 3600) and it wouldn't post. I changed to 16GB sticks and they worked. There is an option buried in the BIOS to enable ECC mode.

Given the Ryzen 3600 didn't recognise the 32GB memory sticks I decided to get a Ryzen 5600X in the hope it will. Its also a little faster than a Ryzen 3600 while still being a 65 watt part. Both the X570-P and X570-Pro motherboards have 4 memory slots. I have to use 4 x 32GB sticks to get to 128GB of memory. To get ECC memory support I have to use an X series CPU. The ones with graphics (the G series) don't support ECC memory, hence the need for a graphics card.