The Beast.

Submitted by Extreme on Tue, 03/01/2005 - 22:25.

Depending on whom you ask you'll get a few names for the server. Dell officially calls it the PowerEdge 2650, I lovingly refer to it as Precious, Justine's nicknamed it The Beast, Brad dubbed it the house on wheels, and the rest of my friends, well, they just call it loud.

In a way I would have been disappointed if it didn't put out as many decibels. I mean, just look at these stats:

2 x Xeon 3.06 Hyperthreading Processors /w 1MB of cache/chip
2 x 1 GB DDR SDRAM sticks
5 x 75 GB 15K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI Seagate hard drives (Raid 1+0 configuration).
1 x Split Backplane.
2 x Intel Pro 1000XT Copper Gigabit Network Adapters
2 x Broadcom Tigon 3 Gigabit Network Adapters.
PERC-3DI RAID adapter (what a waste of money).

It truly is amazing.

To help put in perspective how much computing power I have at my finger tips, I've installed the ultimate benchmarking tool, SETI (nice'd to twenty). I went from 110 work units built up over four years of light usage on four of my other workstations to 892 in about a months time (check my stats)!

I'm just glad that I have noise cancelling headphones :).

Update 06/14/05: UC Berkeley created a framework for distributed scientific applications to load balance system resources amongst numerous distributed projects and to help automate the process of updating.

They call it BOINC - classic isn't it?

In addition to these tré cool updates they greatly improved on the statistics. Which means it's now possible to see how many work units a given machine has contributed towards the users total score (see the updated stats).

All I have to say is, "Wow."