[IPOL discuss] demo running on the new 32 core server

[Nicolas Limare]

Hi all,

The public IPOL demos are now running on our last server. All these
demos are accessible from here: http://www.ipol.im/pub/demo/

Please have a look and tell me if something looks broken.

This server is a Dell R910 with four Intel Xeon X7560 2.27GHz CPUs (8
cores per CPU, 24K cache) and 32G of RAM. It is the most powerful
machine currently available in this category. More details in the wiki:
http://tools.ipol.im/wiki/admin/server/green/
This machines is only used for this demo service, and will not handle
any other function (no shell accounts, no demo tests) in order to
minimize the risks of perturbation. 

Your demos will benefit from this hardware in different ways:
* more processing power in more cores and no extra task to handle
  means the machine is less loaded and it is unlikely that a demo will
  have to wait for CPU ressources
* more RAM means most of the files are kept in memory and will be
  accessed without waiting for the disk input/output
* if you use parallel programming, you can reduce your execution time
  by distributing the data processing on all the cores
* your code may also benefit from the latest vector instructions
  available on this processor: mmx sse sse2 ssse3 sse4_1 sse4_2

The system is Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", with
* linux 2.6.32-5-amd64
* gcc 4.4.5
* make 3.81 (GNU make)
* cmake 2.8.2
* python 2.6.6 (PIL 1.1.7, mako 0.3.4, cherrypy 3.1.2)
* libpng 1.2.44
* libtiff 3.9.4
* libfftw 3.2.2
* libatlas 3.8.3 (locally recompiled)
These versions will probably not change until the next Debian release.

I will now recycle the current demo server into a public development
and test server. This machine has two Intel Xeon E5345 2.33GHz CPUs (4
cores per CPU) and 16G of RAM. During the transition, the
demotest.ipol.im service may be unavailable.

We are currently thinking about buying a second Dell R910 server in
order to have identical development and production environments. The
main issue will probably be hosting this machine, because our local
hosting infrastructures (CMLA/ENS) are almost full. If your lab or
research institution can host a server for IPOL, it may help a lot. We
need a reliable place, with stable power, network and cooling.

Best,

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE - CMLA - ENS Cachan    http://www.cmla.ens-cachan.fr/~limare/
IPOL - image processing on line                          http://www.ipol.im/
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