Crucial Paradigm

If you have noticed a Critical alert on the top left hand side of new Supermicro IPMI cards, this can usally be cleared easily by doing the following:

1. Login to IMPI
2. Go to Server Health -> Sensor Readings
3. Hit the Clear Chassis Intrusion Button.

The error should now be gone! If not, check the sensor reading for anything else abnormal.

While Intel was releasing their 8-core Xeon processor, AMD has released an 8-core, and a whopping 12-core processor! Introductory processors for the top of the line AMD 6176 SE starts at only US$1386!

The new AMD line of processors use a huge 1944 LGA socket, and can scale up to 4 CPUs in a system. This equates to a total possible cores in a 4 way system to 48 cores.

The high end AMD Operation 6176 SE comes with 12 cores, all operating at 2.3Ghz for a total processing power of 27.6Ghz for a single CPU.

Table of CPUs, including frequency and number of cores: http://www.amd.com/us/products/server/processors/6000-series-platform/Pages/6000-series-model-number-methodology.aspx

You are probably wondering how AMD has built a 12-core processor? They’ve placed 2 6-core CPUs on the same die to bring the total core count to 12.

In an effort to try and cut down the manual labour in burning in new hardware, we have been working with RIP linux on a USB key.  The idea is to fully automate a read and write to all drives in the system, and then automatically run memtest.  This way we can just plug the USB key into the system, start the script and it will perform and record the burn in tests to the USB key which we can review after a few days (burn in tests can take up to a few days  depending on the hardware!).

To do this we needed to modify the boot menu on the RIPLinux USB key, and set memtest to start automatically after 10 seconds of no input.    This can be done by doing the following:

Under:
LABEL Boot Memory Tester!

Enter:
MENU DEFAULT

Under:
DEFAULT menu.c32

Enter:
TIMEOUT 100

A script can then placed to run automatically run when RIPLinux boots into the standard kernel.  The script will complete the hard drive tests, then it will reboot the server automatically and the memtest will run.