[osuosl-powerdev] Upcoming hardware changes

[Jerry DeLisle]

Lance Albertson wrote:
> Hey all-
> 
> I wanted to update you on some upcoming changes that will be happening
> with the OSL Powerdev systems. We have recently received new hardware
> from IBM and I'm in the process of getting them setup. I haven't updated
> the website yet (it needs updated badly), but here is the type of
> hardware we've got:
> 
>  * IBM p550 Power5 9133-55
>    4 x dual-core POWER5+ 1.9Ghz
>    8G RAM
>    8 x 73G SCSI HD's in RAID5
>    Gentoo Linux PPC64
> 
>  * IBM QS20 Cell Broadband Engine Blade (3 blades)
>    2 x dual-core Cell BE 0200-250
>    1G RAM
>    1 x 36G IDE (laptop) HD
>    Gentoo Linux PPC64
> 
> I'm currently working on setting two of the blades and the p550 up as an
> open development machine much like the op720/ppc64 is setup. We'll
> finally be managing these machines in a sane manner using our cfengine
> setup, so it will make things a lot easier for us to maintain in the
> future. I'm going to need to send the current op720 back to IBM by the
> beginning of November so I'm working as fast as I can to get these
> machines up.
> 
> Since the op720 (cottonwood) had so many inactive accounts I decided to
> look at the last active accounts on it from the last 365 days. That
> equates to about 50 user accounts (which is about how many are on this
> list). For now I'm not planning on moving your home directory over by
> hand mainly because
> 
>  1) Many of the *rc files might conflict with Gentoo's setup
>  2) Several of you have large home directories, so this is a nice way to
>     clean it up if people aren't actually using them.
> 
> I will however try and get things setup soon so that you can manually
> copy anything you want over. I'll definitely be keeping a backup of the
> home directories after cottonwood gets shipped back and people can send
> an email to support to get their files out of it.
> 
> Thats it for now, but I'll be sending another email in the next few days
> detailing a few questions I have about your needs on the new machine and
> anything we can do to help improve your developing experience on these
> platforms.

Lance,

This is great.  Maybe I am jumping the gun, but one issue with cottonwood is 
that I was unable to get a successful build of gcc/gfortran 4.3.  I think it is 
due to the outdated binutils.  I tried to use local versions of latest binutils, 
but was unable to.  So it would be greatly useful if the new machines had latest 
tools.

Regards,

Jerry