Re: Summary of the Arm ports BoF at DC18

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

[ Apologies for the slow response - I've been struggling with a bad
  cold for the last week. :-( ]

Holger Levsen wrote:
>On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 05:01:05PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>> I now have 3 more basic Synquacer machines in my posession, ready to
>> order new cases, RAM, etc. (They ship in desktop cases with a single
>> 1TB hard drive and 4 GiB of RAM.) Again, I'm hoping to pick more up in
>> the future, but supply is still limited.
> 
>very nice!
>
>> Again, I'll reiterate - these machines are *not* fast for
>> single-threaded workloads but they have a lot of cores so it's
>> perfecty reasonable to run lots of things in parallel. For my own
>> build testing, I've been running up to 6 sbuilds in parallel for
>> better throughput while lots of our builds don't parallelise
>> individually. They should also work well for multiple VMs running in
>> parallel.
>
>6 sbuilds with how much RAM? 

That was with 32GiB.

>> So, practical questions...
>> 
>> Hardware setup: I've configured the earlier 3 as buildds in little 1U
>> cases with 32GiB RAM and mirrored SSDs, but for $reasons they're not
>> yet installed and running. I'm assuming that a similar spec would be
>> wanted for autopkgtest/ci and reproducible builds?
>
>yes. 32gb ram sounds reasonable. 100 or better 200gb ssd is fine for us.

OK, that's easy.

>> If so, we'll need
>> to ask for approval for funds for that - it cost ~£750 per machine to
>> do it. I had offers of funds at DC18 which I'm about to chase to help.
> 
>cool, thanks! (for everything! :)

There's no guarantee of further sponsorship for this, so (as I just
said to Antonio too) asking the DPL for more funding is probably the
way to go.

>> Hosting: Talking to DSA, it seems they're not too keen on hosting /
>> managing new machines for these projects. What are current hosting
>> arrangements for you folks?
>
>we have a zoo of armhf/arm64 machines in Vagrant's basement, 8 arm64
>sleds at codethink and lots of virtual machines in the profitbricks
>cloud. we maintaim them ourselves.

Hmmm, OK. What would be the best option for hosting machines like
this, then? Hell, they're low enough power that I could *maybe* even
host them here at home for you if needed. (Will need to verify with my
wife!).

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
"Further comment on how I feel about IBM will appear once I've worked out
 whether they're being malicious or incompetent. Capital letters are forecast."
 Matthew Garrett, http://www.livejournal.com/users/mjg59/30675.html