Just curious--anyone use any of the IA-k64/Itanium gear?

[lowen]

At $dayjob I have access to three SGI Altix boxen: a 4-CPU Altix 3700, a 20-CPU 3700, and a 30-CPU 350 (54GB of RAM in the 350). These would be the old Columbia supercomputer's little brothers; Columbia was a beast, with like 10240 CPUs.

RHEL and SLES are available, old versions at least, and for a while ten years ago I maintained a private rebuild of CentOS 5 for it. But Linux kernel support for IA-64 was removed this past November so an up to date OS is going to be tricky.

And then there are the power requirements: the Altix 350 system takes two 30A 208/240 VAC single phase circuits to power up all modules.

I ran the Byte benchmarks on it, and it had decent performance for what it was, since it was definitely not built for I/O speed. You can find my posts on the nekonomicon (nekochan mirror/archive) at https://gainos.org/~elf/sgi/nekonomicon/forum/users/rosmaniac/1.html

The Byte benchmarks have their problems but they will at least allow somewhat of an apples-to-apples comparison.

 

[lowen]

I mean, in all fairness "Merced" sucked pretty hard, but there was this window, I dunno, maybe 2003 to 2007?, where Itanium actually could make a pretty good account of itself.

FWIW, in digging back through the Byte UnixBench results I ran on the Altix 350 system here, in single threaded benchmarks for the 1.5GHz Madison/McKinley CPUs in the 350 versus a period-correct comparison with a 2.4GHz Netburst/P4-based Xeon system, the Altix 350 mopped the floor with the Netburst Xeon system of a higher clock speed. At least in the Whetstone benchmark; 1366.9 MWIPS on the Altix versus 934.5 on the Xeon. Now, the Core 2-based E5335 Xeon does MUCH better, with 2338.4, which just shows what a dog Netburst was.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Back in my days on 2cpu.com I knew several forumites with Itaniums. Several dual and quad systems. Real show-pieces for those that had them. I always meant to get one just for the bragging rites, probably well out of my price range now. Of course, I still dream of owning an ALR 6x6.

 

[mark0x01]

I looked after a few HP Itanium servers used for test dr recovery before I retired a few years ago.
Similar cards to the Intel range, and many parts were interchangeable.
The collection used to include Sun and DEC Alpha, but had shrunk to just have a variety of IBM P & I to keep them company.
I decided against giving almost all of these a home when they were surplus as I ran out of space.