Intel-lf-server

Background

Intel, specifically Stephen Wheat, recently donated about 60 2U Intel servers to the LittleFe project. They are engineering samples which were used for a customer demonstration. The motherboards are pre-production units.

Specifications

• 2U cases, very butch with a dual hot-swappable power supply module (only one is populated), 5 case blower fans and space for 6 drives plus a slimline DVD/CD and floppy module.
• Extended ATX form-factor dual CPU motherboard. Only supports SATA drives, no ATA/IDE or SCSI. There is no identifiable model number on the motherboard but there are markings that I think would allow us to track-down a manual from Intel.
• Non-standard DVD/CD cable and interface (marked as such).
• 2 3.2GHz dual core ??? chips, also pre-production.
• Slimline DVD/CD drive.
• No memory, it only takes ECC modules which currently run about $200/gigabyte.
• No disk drives.

Need to do extended testing, Intel's engineer said that some of the boards are likely to fail after 12-24 hours of runtime. If we can weed those out

What's Next

My take is that we would be better off trying to find support (memory, disk, network fabric, space, electricity, management) to set-up the reliable sub-set as a cluster for curriculum design/development and educational use by NCSI/SC Education community than we would be trying to build LittleFe units out of this hardware.

Stephen said there was a strong possibility that another batch of slightly more production machines might become available during Q1 2007.

Notes

• Emails from Stephen and Paul with background on the machines in Earlham/NCSI/Intel-Donation.