New POWER9 machines for the Guix build farm?

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

Fellow Guix,

The Guix sysadmins are considering buying shiny hardware for the 
ci.guix.gnu.org build farm, and it would be awesome if that 
included our first POWER9 machine(s)!

However, few (if any) Guixers have any hands-on experience with 
this architecture, let alone buying and installing whole systems. 
Some remember a bad experience with a prominent vendor, and it 
would appear that they're not alone[0].

There's also some concern that getting these machines up and 
running will take significant effort.

So please, share your expertise and experience in this area! 
Ideally, we need someone to volunteer to (help) set up any new 
POWER9 boxes and later take care of them when needed.  It would 
certainly help justify the multi-thousand-euro bill.

Kind regards,

T G-R

PS: For the shorter term, I've applied for an 8-core POWER9 LE 
instance (with 16 GiB of RAM) for Guix at OSUOSL[1].  Assuming 
that it's accepted, it should be available within a week.

[0]: 
https://drewdevault.com/2019/09/23/RaptorCS-Blackbird-a-horror-story.html, 
but read 
https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/10/RaptorCS-redemption.html as 
well :-)
[1]: https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/

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