Dr. B. in da SPECTORS project

Cloud Computing

The idea stems from Prof. Sandro Leuchter. Together with Matthias Krauledat he purchased 60 Dell R220 power edge servers to set up a cloud computing environment: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

The setup of each Dell R220 as of 2014:

Components

1 Dell(TM) PowerEdge(TM) R210/R220 Rack Mount Server Heat Sink
1 Intel Celeron G1820 2.7GHz, 2M Cache, No Turbo, 2C, 54W
1 MOD,PWA,PLNR,SV,TRPM,PER220
1 3.5“ Chassis with up to 2×3.5 Cabled Hard Drives
1 2.5” Chassis with up to 2×2.5 Cabled Hard Drives
1 Riser with Single x16 Gen3 PCIe Slot
1 iDRAC Port Card
1 Electronic System Documentation and OpenManage DVD Kit for R220
1 1.600MHz UDIMMs
1 4GB UDIMM, 1.600MT/s, Niederspannung, Single Rank, x4 Datenbreite
1 500GB 7.2k RPM Near-Line SAS 6Gbps 2.5in Cabled Hard Drive
1 PERC H310 Integrated RAID Controller, Full Height
2 C13 auf C14, PDU Stil, 10A, 6,5ft Netzkabel
1 H310 Cable, SAS R220
1 No Mouse Included
1 1U/2U Static Rails for 2-Post & 4-Post Racks
1 iDRAC7 Enterprise

Software

1 Leistungsoptimiert BIOS Einstellungen

Service

1 Base Warranty
1 1Yr Basic Warranty - Next Business Day - Minimum Warranty
1 3Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service
1 INFO 1Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service
1 INFO Declined Remote Consulting

R220

CPU Options for PowerEdge R220

Intel® Xeon® processor E3-1200 v3 product family, Intel Pentium®, Intel Celeron®, Intel Core®

This v3 is a Haswell architecture: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Xeon#Haswell-Generation

https://www.computerbase.de/2014-05/intel-xeon-e3-1200-v3-haswell-refresh-spezifikationen/

BUG in Haswell: TSX not working properly.
“In August 2014, Intel announced that a bug exists in the TSX implementation on Haswell, Haswell-E, Haswell-EP and early Broadwell CPUs, which resulted in disabling the TSX feature on affected CPUs via a microcode update. The bug was fixed in F-0 steppings of the vPro-enabled Core M-5Y70 Broadwell CPU in November 2014.”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_Synchronization_Extensions#implementation

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intel-Bug-Vorerst-kein-Transactional-Memory-2292196.html

“Insbesondere bei Supercomputern und Datenbankservern kann die Funktion deutliche Geschwindigkeitssteigerungen bringen, denn TSX sorgt dafür, dass voneinander abhängige Threads Cores weniger oft auf gesperrte Speicherbereiche stoßen.”
http://www.golem.de/news/transactional-memory-intel-schaltet-tsx-wegen-bug-bei-haswell-ab-1408-108545.html

I would like to use Xeon E3-1240 v5 or Xeon E3-1240L v5 (low power). Version v5 is not compatible with the chipset C222 of PowerEdge R220. The v5 needs dedictated Intel Xeon chipsets C232 or C236.

We are stuck to v3 and therefore the TSX bug!!!