[Savannah-hackers-public] UPDATE: New hardware for *.savannah.gnu.org and lists.gnu.org

[Lisa Marie Maginnis]

Hi all,

As many of you know, we have aquired new hardware for *.savannah.gnu.org as
well as lists.gnu.org. The new board is the Asus KGPE-D16, and it is to
be running LibreBoot (https://libreboot.org). It will have 32 cores (dual
socket, 16 cores per CPU -- we went with the AMD Opteron 6272) and the
ability to have up to 256GB of memory total for the host (128GB per socket).
In addition, the new production arrays for Savannah and Lists will be running
on redundant (softraid, md) SSDs.

As you can see, these upgrades will make a *huge* difference, and we are very
excited to announce this planned upgrade! :)

I am starting this thread to get everyone on the same page as to what our
time-line looks like for the upgrade. Here is the current state of things:

 - We have run into a fairly critical problem with the RDIMM modules we
   initially bought. We have been working with the coreboot/libreboot
   teams to get the bugs properly reported and fixed.

 - In the mean time, we have ordered different RDIMM modules (Samsung
   M393B2G70BH0-CK 16GB RDIMM ECC) which appear to get around the
   current problems we are seeing with initializing memory during boot.

 - The new host is currently running and being tested for stability issues with
   some of the slower and lower quality RDIMM modules with ECC that I have
   on-site. So far, since Monday the new host has been extremely stable even
   while under a full workload.

 - We expect the new RDIMM modules to be on-site by Monday, I will update
   this thread when I have more to report on this. Once the RDIMM modules
   have been tested and verified to work I will announce an upgrade time
   line.

 - To those worried about downtime: we have moved savannah in the past, we
   estimate the downtime to be now greater than 10mins for any service we move

Thanks & stay tuned for updates,

-- 
~Lisa Marie Maginnis
Senior System Administrator
Free Software Foundation
http://fsf.org http://gnu.org
GPG Key: 61EEC710