Six core AMD Opteron

June 26th, 2009, 5:30 pm

At work I was told I had a large chunk of money to spend for this school year and to use it wisely or not get it later on, so I ordered a server. I needed a huge ass server with tons of memory and processing power because it will be my ltsp server, and I've seen upwards of 50+ people logged in running memory and processor intensive programs like open office and the gimp and stuff. The server I ordered is an HP G6 server with not only one, but two processors...those new six core AMD opterons, as well as a terabyte and a half of useable hard drive space (six 300GB in RAID5) and 64 gigs of RAM. I will admit, my eyes were bigger than my stomach when I ordered it but it only costed my about $7700 so I'm happy.

I didn't order an operating system with it because I can't stomach suse, and red hat doesn't seem to let LTSP work for some reason, and because of the LTSP and my thin clients microsoft is out of the question. I was thinking I'd use fedora and the K12 linux, but I'm having doubts if I can get it to work with that much computing power. So my next idea was gentoo because it seems to be able to support just about any processor architecture you can throw at it, but I've never been successful using gentoo in the past.

So maybe I could jerry rig my own custom kernel, but again I've never done that either. I think I got myself into a world of *plum* ordering that server, but its too late now so I'll just have to deal with it. My long winded question here is: Does anyone know anything about which kernel to use with these new processors? I can't seem to find anything on google that is any use. Would the x86_64 or the amd64 or whatever it is called work? I've got time to play around and get everything working, the current ltsp server I have will suffice for this year but I'd still like to get it off my rack as soon as possible. Anything any gurus can think of will be a great help.

June 28th, 2009, 10:50 am

well, it's going to be a 64 bit capable processor so any 64 bit OS should be able to handle the hardware just fine..

June 28th, 2009, 11:58 am

I hope so, I got a little bit panicked when I started thinking about working with the kernel and which modules I might need and stuff. I hope this server lives up to all the hype.

June 29th, 2009, 5:47 am

yea.. *tinkering* with the kernel sounds like something that should be left to the developers, unless by tinkering you meant compiling the kernel yourself. which isn't bad.. it just takes more effort to maintain. but yea.. 64 bit OS's support up to like 256TB of memory and the number of cores the proc has shouldn't really matter.. *nix has been running servers for years >.> i'm pretty sure if there were problems, they've been resolved by now ;]

June 29th, 2009, 7:34 am

I guess those big huge unix main frames do have hundreds of processors, I'm feeling a little more confident now.