128 ARM64 cores {Altra Max}, 256GB of RAM, 24 hot-swappable NVME drives; definitely the craziest machine I've ever built.

[thomrstrom@triangletoot.party]

128 ARM64 cores {Altra Max}, 256GB of RAM, 24 hot-swappable NVME drives; definitely the craziest machine I've ever built. Holy hell, this one is fast #FreeBSD box though.

Why not just rent from the Cloud? After just 33.8 days, the hardware pays for itself versus the equivalent from GCP. That's insane.

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@thomrstrom is that the ASRock Rack Ampere Altra Max board?

[thomrstrom@triangletoot.party]

@ariadne Gigabyte R272-P30, courtesy of eBay.

[thorium@social.linux.pizza]

@thomrstrom Using Lvm RAID or ZFS on those NVMe drives?

[thomrstrom@triangletoot.party]

@Thorium Nothing on here yet, but once I find a good deal on some used 7.68TB NVME drives, it'll be RAIDZ2 (ZFS).

[thomrstrom@triangletoot.party]

obligatory htop screenshot.

[acirep@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@thomrstrom sweet potatoes! What are you using it for?

[thomrstrom@triangletoot.party]

@acirep New master training & file server for https://atomdrift.org/ - ingesting terrabytes of open-source updates per month to build an offline ML model to detect malicious software in open-source.

Reverse-engineering software is an embarassingly parallel problem, so all of the cores help tremendously =]

[acirep@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@thomrstrom ouch, embarrassingly interesting project, you just changed my weekend plans

[troed@swecyb.com]

@thomrstrom that's just ... nuts

[gbraad@mastodon.social]

@thomrstrom

Placed an Ampere server in a data enter in Amsterdam with some friends. Best decision ever. Crazy machine !

[zolotkey@holonet.imperialba.se]

@thomrstrom Where did you build it from? I am interested in replacing a Xeon server with ARM64

[thomrstrom@triangletoot.party]

@zolotkey I bought the base machine from eBay; Gigabyte P272-P30; ASRock makes a motherboard for more of a DIY kit; the CPUs are easily available on eBay, at least in North America.

[vbatts@fosstodon.org]

@thomrstrom nice! Is it rack mounted or a tower? How much did it run you?

[thomrstrom@triangletoot.party]

@vbatts I've got it racked in a TecMojo 16U deskside rack (an absolute steal for $120US).

I lowballed an eBay seller and got a pretty sweet deal on it, but won't admit to the price in case my wife is reading this

It's both more efficient and less expensive than any other 128-core machine on the market though; especially one with these sort of storage capabilities.

[vbatts@fosstodon.org]

@thomrstrom lol still that's awesome

[tomaoki@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@thomrstrom
I think clouds are NOT for regularly highly loaded use-cases. This should best work on mainframes.

The use-cases that clouds fit best would be (foreseeable, and predictable) huge load impulse that are 1000x, 10000x or even crazier are expected.
Keeping such an powerful computer in hand would be crazy, but contracting with bare-minimum for regular loads and purchase additional resources only when such short but quite huge impulse of workloads are expected would be nice.

[rmi@cloudisland.nz]

@thomrstrom This is extremely badass.