Re: New POWER9 machines for the Guix build farm?

[Jonathan Brielmaier <jonathan.brielmaier@web.de>]

On 28.11.19 01:50, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:
> Fellow Guix,
>
> The Guix sysadmins are considering buying shiny hardware for the
> ci.guix.gnu.org build farm, and it would be awesome if that included our
> first POWER9 machine(s)!

This would be very neat.

> So please, share your expertise and experience in this area! Ideally, we
> need someone to volunteer to (help) set up any new POWER9 boxes and
> later take care of them when needed.  It would certainly help justify
> the multi-thousand-euro bill.

I own now a RaptorCS Blackbird[0] with an 8 core CPU and 32GiB RAM for
half a year. I use it as my daily desktop driver. It runs openSUSE
Tumblweed[1].

Setup was quite easy if you only want to use it as server without an
GPU. You only need a long enough (ca 15cm) 4mm hex key to screw the fan
on to the CPU. I could borrow mine.

The rest of the installation and setup process wasn't that different
from installing a x86 server. The nice thing is the openBMC chip, so
remote management is quite nice :)

All in all the biggest pain point for me, was getting the machine
through the customs. But I heard from people in the EU who had a pretty
smooth experience with that.

I offer my help in the whole process (ordering, customs, setup,
installation, maintenance).

~Jonathan

P.S: It might be worth to ask RaptorCS and IBM, if they could give us
some discounts.

[0] https://raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html
[1] https://software.opensuse.org/distributions/tumbleweed