POWER8 Workstation Launches On Crowdfunding: $4k For Motherboard, $18k For System

[Adarion]

Can someone lend me 5000 US$? No? Aww, sad. I really hope they will succeed but at my current state of financial limitation I won't be able to spend much more than 10 USD. Darn, it would be such a nice machine!

[mparnaudeau]

I would love to get a POWER8 based workstation but that's too much money.

That would be great if other OpenPower members could help or if IBM could promote it as the reference developer workstation. Even with a low-end (cheaper) POWER8, such a workstation will allow people to develop and port software, to be involved and create some movement, to get feedback and provide bug reports and ideas, ...

If they just start a crowdfunding action, I also wonder when it may be available ...

[mparnaudeau]

I would love a get a POWER8 based machine but that's unfortunately too much money.

That woud be great if Talos could be helped by other OpenPower members or IBM to promote a reference developer workstation.
Even with a low-end (cheaper) POWER8, people could start to work on a real machine to develop or port software, bring feedback and bug reports and ideas, ... and some movement around this machine and its ecosystem.

As they have just started a crowfunding action, I also wonder when it may be available ...

[markd]

You really should ignore the $18,000 system. That machine is configured with a 32 GB workstation graphics card. Those things are more than $5,000 on their own! You would only need one of those things if you needed to use massive amounts of triangles or textures for movie animation work, or to do huge GPU compute jobs.

I'm planning to configure mine with 64 GB of RAM, an older consumer level AMD GPU, and a single SSD.

This is hillarious :-D
They really sell that thing with a 5k graphics card? :-O

May I quote the description on the crowdfunding page:
"We recommend any NVIDIA GK104-based card, which is a reasonably modern GPU that can be initialized by and used with the libre Nouveau driver."

So they really are selling you a system where you have to use the open source drivers (I guess it's no different with the AMD cards). I mean: Yes, to have your completely open system, you wouldn't want to use the binary blobs of the gfx card vendors anyway (if there were any for the POWER architecture). But what the hell? Then this is not a high performance workstation any more. In terms of graphics at least.

Unfortunately I just see no way there can be a high performance workstation made out of open hard/software only. And again - if that were a reasonably priced system for the enthusiast, I'd be happy to get one.

[Pickup]

Looks interesting. But most of common people uses common PCs. It would be nice it they made a "younger brother" of this machine, good for everyday home, office and gaming use ($18k are a bit off-budget for people who won't pay that much for a car)

[hiryu]

Looking at the orices for Tesla cards, they seem to run roughly $7-10k. As someone already mentioned, Telsa cards can (or do) come with 32gb. That's probably ECC too. Not to mention 256gb of ECC memory is going to be extremely expensive too.

You could build a much cheaper system with much more reasonable specs if you just spring for the motherboard and CPU combo. Keep it to 32-64GB memory, get a cheaper GPU or use the integrated.

My concern is remote management. I haven't been able to determine what's available, but some comments in this thread mentioned Intel's management engine, which I have no experience with so I don't know how much it's capable of...

[markd]

Looking at the orices for Tesla cards, they seem to run roughly $7-10k. As someone already mentioned, Telsa cards can (or do) come with 32gb. That's probably ECC too. Not to mention 256gb of ECC memory is going to be extremely expensive too.

You could build a much cheaper system with much more reasonable specs if you just spring for the motherboard and CPU combo. Keep it to 32-64GB memory, get a cheaper GPU or use the integrated.

My concern is remote management. I haven't been able to determine what's available, but some comments in this thread mentioned Intel's management engine, which I have no experience with so I don't know how much it's capable of...

Just checked - there *are* POWER8 drivers from Nvidia for Tesla products. So the driver problem for those cards is out of the way. Too bad that you won't see anything on your screen with those cards. They are meant for gpu computing tasks and thus they spared the connector for a display :-P
Maybe there is a way to convince the driver that your GeForce or Quadro card is a Tesla. But that'd be a hack solution that people buying in this price range usually don't put up with.

[starshipeleven]

My concern is remote management. I haven't been able to determine what's available, but some comments in this thread mentioned Intel's management engine, which I have no experience with so I don't know how much it's capable of...

Intel ME is only in Intel stuff, not here. It is also a bad thing.

They mention "AST2300 BMC with HDMI video". (later they say ast2400, but anyway)
AST2300 is both the iGPU AND the Board Management system (the hardware backdoor thingy you use for "lights out management") http://www.aspeedtech.com/products.php?fPath=20&rId=200

This BMC seems to be opensource as Facebook is using it in its open infrastructure project https://code.facebook.com/posts/1601...em-management/
the repo to build firmware for these things (maintained by facebook) is here https://github.com/facebook/openbmc

You probably need to ask them if they plan to use this, as they don't state anything of the sort in the crowdfunding.

[starshipeleven]

unapproved post for hiryu above this one

[starshipeleven]

Mh, just got an answer from the guy at Raptor engineering (removed my mail and my name from it):

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 10/17/2016 02:12 PM, Crowd Supply wrote:
> ---------- submitted a question about your project, "Talos
> Secure Workstation":
>
> I wanted to know something about the BMC on this board.
> You state it is an AST2300 (or a AST2400 a few lines later).
> This hardware is supported by Facebook's OpenBMC open firmware for BMC
> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1601610310055392/introducing-openbmc-an-open-software-framework-for-next-generation-system-management/
> and here the repo https://github.com/facebook/openbmc
> Is your BMC going to use that firmware?
> Thanks for the time
> --------

The BMC is an AST2400. It will use the open firmware available here:

https://github.com/openbmc

We are currently working with the project maintainers to bring that tree
into a usable state on Talos™ and similar systems.

- --
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
+1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line)
+1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard)
https://www.raptorengineering.com
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So the BMC is a AST2400 and will use OpenBMC firmware https://github.com/openbmc

This thing is good. These guys really did their homework.