Hi All,
This is a second follow-up to my two posts (here and there) where I describe my cashing in on some GRC gains.
I used a small portion of the proceeds to purchase an Odroid XU-4 as discussed in the second post. I have been working diligently on getting a used server with the balance of the proceeds. After a while of searching and "discussing" the matter with my now former spouse, I finally pulled the trigger on "The Beast".
I present to you "The Beast". A refurbished IBM x3690 X5. It sports two Xeon E7-2860 CPUs and 128 GB of RAM. Each CPU has 10 hyperthreaded cores at a base frequency of 2.27 GHz. As a result, the machine can crunch 40 tasks simultaneously! Granted, not at the fastest frequency, but quantity is a quality in and of itself. I did remove 64 GB of RAM as I wanted to cut down on electricity usage and heat. I may also sell these sticks and recoup some of the $1k CAD investment (I don't think I got screwed on the price, but feel free to let me know in the comments).
So since March 17, I have been crunching work units in the ODLK1 project and running the CPUs at about 80% capacity to manage heat. Not that they can't run at the temps at 100%, the fans are just too loud! At last check, the RAC output is about 7.6k. This gives an approximate Mag of 15. I think the RAC will settle around 8.2k or so.
I'm pretty sure that there is a better project out there for this machine, and I am open to any suggestions that you may have (although I did try SRBase, but the units were all errors).
Here's to more crunching!
