Tyan S4881+M4881, SMP, 128GB RAM support?

[Steve Kargl]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 11:23:09AM -0400, Gibson, Jasen (GE Indust, ConsInd, consultant) wrote:
> >On Sat, Jul 01, 2006 at 12:37:53PM -0500, Michael C. Wu wrote:
> >
> >I don't have the s4881 motherboard, but I would be
> >surprized if FreeBSD did not work on it. 
> >
> >My research group recent purchased a small hyperblade
> >cluster from Appro.com.  The system has 6 nodes that
> >are based on the s2881 motherboard with 2 dual-core
> >2.4 GHz opteron, 16 GB of memory, and 233 GB hard drives.
> >MPICH2 and gfortran appear to work quite nicely on 
> >the cluster.  The cluster includes a GigE switch, which
> >I hope to replace with infiniband or myrinet in the
> >future.
> >
> >I have no experience with the daughter board you mentioned.
> >
> 
> Hey Steve, are the drives on the SATA controller?  I'm looking at
> a couple Tyan's for production use as well, S28xx or S38xx series,
> and the SATA/SATA II chipsets are the only thing that worry me.
> Not seeing any promising experiences on the compatibility list on
> the freebsd.org website.  If I know at least one person has that
> SATA chipset working fine, I'll feel much safer.
>

See Freddie's response :)

I have only a single SATA drive attached to the onboard SiI3114
controller on each node.  I haven't seen a problem, but my setup
may be atypical in that the cluster is meant for computational
work.  The 6 hard drives are setup with NFS mounted filesystems,
where user home directories are periodically rsync'd from the master
node to one of the slave nodes.  Most of the disk space for the
remaining 4 slave nodes is set up has world writable tmp directories
for dumping large data sets. 

-- 
Steve