Preparing Ursa and Lyra for the CI
Hello everyone,
I'd like to introduce Ursa and Lyra, which are the two machines that I'm
currently preparing as workers for the Debian ROCm CI [1]. I'm just
waiting for a shipment of power cables to arrive and then I'll be
bringing them online. Each server is a Dell Poweredge C4130 with 2x
Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 (Broadwell; 18 cores @2.3GHz), 128 GiB of RAM, and
2x 2000W PSUs. Lyra contains 4x MI25 GPUs (Vega 10; gfx900). Ursa
contains 2x AMD FirePro S9300 X2 GPUs (Capsaicin; gfx803). My website
has photos of both servers [2][3].
The FirePro GPUs came with Ursa and I'm crossing my fingers they will be
useful. It's hard to find information on those old GPUs, but the
Capsaicin and Fiji architectures seem to be nearly identical. The MI8
GPU used the Fiji architecture [4], so I'm hopeful that this
configuration for Ursa is roughly equivalent to 4x MI8 GPUs. With that
said, the exact GPU loadout for Ursa is yet to be determined. I'm
tempted to swap them out for MI6 GPUs (Ellesmere; gfx803), as those
cards are more efficient and have more VRAM [5].
Ursa and Lyra will temporarily be hosted from my home while the systems
are validated and the hardware finalized. I expect Lyra to be a stable
part of the CI before the end of October, but I may spend longer
experimenting with different hardware in Ursa. However, these servers
will be very noisy, so I plan to find them a new home in a proper data
centre at the earliest opportunity.
Sincerely,
Cory Bloor
P.S. You might have noticed the 384 GiB of RAM sitting beside Lyra that
will be used to build the next three CI servers [3]. I'm working my way
from the older architectures to the newer ones. Next up will be the
Cassiopeia server for testing Navi 10, 12, and 14.
[1]: https://ci.rocm.debian.net/
[2]: https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/ursa-lyra.jpg
[3]: https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/ursa-lyra-open.jpg
[4]: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-instinct-mi8.c2928
[5]: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-instinct-mi6.c2927
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