SCRAPPED AT Ujima House in Wembley. Borg was a stack of 4 linked machines that combine as one, resulting in half a terabyte of RAM and 64 Cores. It ran Linux designed for High Performance Computing on computationally expensive tasks.

Status

Borg
Model	IBM 3950 M2
Sub-category	Defunct
Status	Scrapped
Accessories	Bits
Training requirement	yes
ACnode	no
Owner	Hackspace
Origin	Donation
Location	Basement rack
Maintainers	Oni

The BORG cluster was complete. The system was Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. We have 4 units in place (the maximum amount) with linux 12.04LTS installed with the usual hackspace credentials.

There are still some tasks to perform before the system is hackspace friendly. See the todo list below.

Naming

We named this machine after Anita Borg. Also the Borg.

They're currently labeled as BORG1 through BORG6

Access

Access is via ssh. This system requires physically plugging in the power cable and launching the complex through the RAS controller on Borg5

Steps to boot the cluster

Firstly, locate the power cable. There is a blue, 16Amp socket on the wall. Nearby will be a power bar with a matching 16Amp plug. Attach this to the socket. (NEW: since now the plug is somehow seating very strongly, we unplug the primary cable from the power strip on the ground instead.) Borg should power up
Each borg node has a dual powersupply, if all 8 PSU's are connected it may trip the breaker in the supply to the rack - if this happens the ups will start to beep. Switch the breaker back on if this happens!
You can get away with only connecting one psu on each machine.
The lights on borg should be FLASHING green. A slow flash on the power buttons. DO NOT press any of these buttons. All the machines need to be brought up via the RAS
With a webbrowser on your laptop, attached to the hackspace network, navigate to http://172.31.24.170 (was "http://172.31.24.171, I believe this is the right IP address :S")
This is Borg5, the headnode - you should see a webpage asking for username and password. Username USERID password PASSW0RD (note the zero in password as oppose to the letter 'o')
Navigate to the last item on the left - RAS Partitions.
You should see the partition on the right as a block diagram. All the nodes should be connected and in Blue. Find a button marked something like "boot partition". Press it.
All the borgs should start whirring, more lights will come on and the power lights will turn green
Wait about 10 minutes

Borg now has a static ip and gets username and password info from LDAP. It also mounts home directorys from colin. All hackspace members can sudo on Borg. You should have access to all the CPUs and memory in all 4 borg machines.

Specs, Layout and Status

IBM 3950 M2

16 cores total
- 4 x Xeon 7330: 4 cores @ 2.4 GHz "Tigerton" Intel Ark spec sheet
128 GB ram

The list reflects the layout in the rack.

BORG5 - 4 CPUs, 128GB RAM - SN 99C5979 - 1.16 BIOS - HEAD Node
BORG3 - 4 CPUs, 128GB RAM - SN 99C5980 - 1.16 BIOS
BORG6 - 4 CPUs, 128GB RAM - 1.16 BIOS
BORG4 - 4 CPUs, 128GB RAM - SN 99B3501 - 1.16 BIOS
~~BORG1 - 3 CPUs, 8GB RAM~~
~~BORG2 - 3 CPUs, 8GB RAM~~

BORGs one and two are lower spec and cannot be linked to the cluster (max of 4 nodes) so should be cannibalised for spares and disposed of.

IP

172.31.24.12 - RAS 172.31.24.11 - head node

RAS

The RAS II is a separate control system that is setup in the bios and accessible as soon as a BORG unit has power (i.e, if the green light is flashing OR solid). Using a web browser head to either

Borg3/Borg6 http://172.31.24.170
Borg5 http://172.31.24.171

Username USERID password PASSW0RD

ScaleXpandr

In order to link upto 4 borgs together we need to use the special cables. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247630.pdf - page 235 shows how this is done to create an SMP style set of nodes.

Logbook

Borg/LogBook

Running Debian

Needs the non-free bnx2 firmware on a flash drive for the install to work, (could try to add it to the install initrd)
Something something IBM Calgary IOMMU something something leads to DMA errors and the LSI MegaRaid raid card dosn't work, booting with "iommu=soft" makes it work but may not be ideal. search https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/x86/x86_64/boot-options.txt for iommu
The incantation seems to be: iommu=soft,calgary megaraid_sas.msix_disable=1

Upgrading the bios

Do a diskless boot, the go do Debian and then "Jessie amd64 Diskless for BORGs", log in as root (password 'root', this diskless setup is for testing only!), then:

cd ibm-bios/z/ ./lflash64

This is an upgrade to bios version 1.16

We also need to upgrade:

The RSA II thing: https://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5086633 The FPGA (in the scaleXpander?) The BMC

We might be able to do it individually, or perhaps use the IBM UpdateXpress thing, which needs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 x86-64 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 x86-64.

We need to reset all the bios etc settings to there defaults.

link dump

good megaraid cli guide:

reflashing?!?:

http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2013/09/reflashing-lsi-megaraid-sas-8708elp.html

Usage

Energy Consumption

Meter in-line

Testing with a normal, common-o-garden multimeter inline with the plug, on all 4 BORG units we have:

1.28amps at 240v - standby
7.8 amps peak on start
5 to 6 amps normal operation
9.48 amps with all 64 processors at 100%

Blender Tests

Recent tests comparing Borg3 with AWS , rendering 30 Frames of a small Blender Scene with Blender 2.76 and maxing out the processors:

AWS

$0.520 per On Demand Linux c1.xlarge Instance Hour at 12 hours
Cost is roughly £4.60 at current exchange
Spot instances are possible with Brenda or similar - at $0.07 the cost would be roughly 53p

Borg3

£0.12p per Kilowatt Hour
With all 16 Cores operating at 100% Borg was drawing 560Watts
To render the same scene took 206minutes
Total Cost 23p

Borg (being a server) could add substantially to our electricity costs. To help this we can offset some of it by the retiring of other machines in the space. It has also been agreed that if it takes up more than 275W regularly then a decision about Borgs future will have to be made. If it goes over 300W we will have to re-think our strategy. These figures are a maximum and equate to about £27 per month in electricity costs. The power consumption will be regularly measured and anyone is welcome to report power consumption levels.

Location

The Rack in the basement.

TODO

Work out whats up with the 4th missing raid controller - looks like one node does not share it's pci devices?!?
Play with the raid management thingy
https://github.com/chicks-net/megamap
Work out what disks we have and where they are and what they do
sdc and sdd are now free. (was a vmware install for emf)
Re-install with debian?
~~Get it under ansible (with nfs home dirs and ldap users)~~ done
remove the FC cards we don't need. (or get a FC disk array!)
channel bond some of the nics
do something with the 10Gb Nic's?!?!?

Potential uses

Rendering video and 3D
Bio-informatics number crunching (bio-hackers?)
simulation
realtime ray-tracing
Radio FFT decoding in real-time (Cubesat related)

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Archive:Equipment/Borg

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