A Six Month Redux After Building A 60+ System Basement Server/Computer Room

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Six Month Redux After Building A 60+ System Basement Server/Computer Room

It's been just over six months since I completed construction on the large 60+ system server room where a ton of Linux benchmarking takes place just not for Phoronix.com but also the new LinuxBenchmarking.com daily performance tracking initiative and testing and development around our Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org software. Here's a look back, a few recommendations to reiterate for those aspiring to turn their cellar into a server farm, and a few things I'd do differently next time around.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22215

[TeoLinuX]

Congrats on your work on that room!
It's really great. I'm just curious to know if all those tests are really worth it tho. Are they mainly regression search on large projects as kernel, mesa etc?
Or you use the server farm also for the usual benchmarks of your articles?
I hope you find a profitable business point, to be able to face all those electricity expenses.

[Michael]

Congrats on your work on that room!
It's really great. I'm just curious to know if all those tests are really worth it tho. Are they mainly regression search on large projects as kernel, mesa etc?
Or you use the server farm also for the usual benchmarks of your articles?
I hope you find a profitable business point, to be able to face all those electricity expenses.

On LinuxBenchmarking.com it tracks the kernel/Mesa/etc.

It's also used for Phoronix.com article tests too when needing a system for whatever testing, can still schedule one-off testing, custom context management, etc, via Phoromatic.

It is useful for PTS/Phoromatic development as have been able to track down bugs/bottlenecks and other areas for improvement when doing real-world widescale testing so that paying clients running PTS on thousands of systems don't run into problems, etc.

[Mr. Octus]

Michael I would think dropping the projector for a normal monitor would help to reduce some heat, is it left on all the time? Every bit helps.

[Michael]

Michael I would think dropping the projector for a normal monitor would help to reduce some heat, is it left on all the time? Every bit helps.

The projector is only used like ~3 hours a month. Most of the time it's monitors unless I'm doing a bunch of maintenance/checks on systems.

[RoninDusette]

I can't believe that it has already been 6 months. Good stuff, sir.

[budric]

What do you use for configuration management? Like getting base system up with all the required users.

[GDJacobs]

Hmm... any love for Bohemian beer?

It would be nice if your utility company gave you a deal for off-peak power usage. Phoromatic sounds smart enough to preferentially spin up systems for testing at night.

[SystemCrasher]

server room plus bar

Whatever this is best server room I ever seen. As for power consumption... I guess systems which are not in use could be configured for deep powersaving? E.g. spin down HDDs, put monitor on standby, etc (at least AMD GPUs can seriously reduce power consumption when monitor goes into powersaving mode). Or even complete power down with something like wake-on-lan? Though cycling main power supply increases risk of failures.

[Michael]

What do you use for configuration management? Like getting base system up with all the required users.

Just bare distro install of whatever distro I want to test with, install PTS, then activate the Phoromatic systemd client.