[Cerowrt-devel] Cero-state this week and last

[david at lang.hm]

On Sun, 8 Apr 2012, Dave Taht wrote:

> If I were to throw, say, a 48 cpu box at this problem, and do builds
> entirely out of ram (doable) I don't know how much further up a
> parallel build would scale. Certainly all the dependencies would have
> to get worked out.
>
> I sure wouldn't mind having a couple of these:
>
> http://www.penguincomputing.com/hardware/linux_servers/configurator/intel/relion2800
>
> or these:
>
> http://www.penguincomputing.com/hardware/linux_servers/configurator/amd/altus1804
>
> to play with.
>
> The ROI of stuff like that... vs the cost of electricity and rack
> space of the hardware we've had donated to this project - would
> probably pay off inside of a year or two, and that doesn't count the
> very real productivity improvement for everyone that could get a full
> build turned around in under 19 hours.
>
> Regrettably up-front capital like that is hard to come by, as
> bufferbloat.net is not an 'exciting new age startup' with billions of
> dollars per year of potential market cap. We're merely trying to save
> billions of people a lot of headache, frustration, and time, and get
> the technology into everything without any form of direct form of
> recompense. It's kind of a harder sell. For some reason.
>
> It's cheaper short term, if not long term, to bleed out electricity
> and rack space monthly, and try to have mental processes that cope
> with overnight builds, and scavange more free hardware wherever we
> can.

this sounds like the sort of thing that kickstarter (or similar) is 
designed for.

you may also want to think about asking some of these companies for 
donations directly.

> Incidentally I did cost out using amazon EC2, etc, last year, and that
> was highway robbery, given the amount of cpu cycles this task can
> consume.

yeah, I did some pricing on this sort of thing and found that if you 
needed a system as much as 2 hours a day, you were better off just getting 
a dedicated box from someplace like serverbeach.

David Lang