Re: Help me setup home-office hardware with free software
On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 10:36:11AM +0530, Pankaj Jangid wrote:
> I am setting up one (or may be two) home-office servers. I have 6 ATI
> Radian RX580 graphics cards that are lying in cold storage. I used them
> a couple of years back to experiment with various crypto-mining
> technologies.
>
There's a large thread going on about firmware elsewhere in Debian and on LWN.net :(
Radeon RX580 card will almost certainly require the non-free firmware package - amdgpu from non-free. It may be that if you don't have that firmware
in place that the cards won't work properly, though they should be recognised by the motherboard.
> I want these cards to be put to use for experimenting with
> multi-threading work loads like may be Machine Learning or may be Image
> Processing of deep space data or may be run GNU Radio for experimenting
> with signals.
>
> I don’t want any proprietary software to run on these systems. And hence
> exploring possibilities. My questions:
>
> 1. I had a look at i7 and Ryzen 7. For multi-threading applications, it
> appears that Ryzen is better choice because it allows more number of
> simultaneous threads. 16 as compared to 8 on i7. Does anybody have
> experience with these? Please share your recommendation.
>
> 2. Are there good general purpose motherboards available for 3 graphics
> cards? I have experience with motherboards with 12 graphics
> cards. But those were not general purpose. They were specifically
> designed for cryto mining purpose only.
>
> 3. I’ll also put these machine to serve local copy of all my data. I’ll
> synchronize it with some cloud space. I need recommendations for
> reliable hard disks. A combination of SSD/HDD to balance between
> cost, performance and reliability will probably be best. But I really
> don’t know much about the hardware.
>
> I already have good modular corsair 1200w power-supply. So I’ll put that
> to use.
>
> I need your help to setup a system completely free of proprietary
> software. Please do reply.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pankaj Jangid
>
> GnuPG Fingerprint: 0B62 7424 3B26 A911 052A DDE6 7C95 6E6F F858 7689
>
All the best, as ever,
Andy C.
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