What's the cheapest NUMA machine for engine development?

[Jesse Gersenson]

What's the cheapest NUMA machine one can buy for developing a modern NUMA-aware chess engine?

[jdart]

There are lots of used dual Xeon systems on eBay. A working dual quad system seems to run about $175 and up. One example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-PRECISION- ... Sw1WJZFMRY

--Jon

[ZirconiumX]

There are lots of used dual Xeon systems on eBay. A working dual quad system seems to run about $175 and up. One example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-PRECISION- ... Sw1WJZFMRY

--Jon

Vincent Diepeveen recommended to me the Xeon L5420 as a processor, and my only real issue building a system around them was finding a set of coolers that fit LGA771, and cooling the ECC RAM. Other than that, the machine is still very capable.

[Adam Hair]

There are lots of used dual Xeon systems on eBay. A working dual quad system seems to run about $175 and up. One example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-PRECISION- ... Sw1WJZFMRY

--Jon

Vincent Diepeveen recommended to me the Xeon L5420 as a processor, and my only real issue building a system around them was finding a set of coolers that fit LGA771, and cooling the ECC RAM. Other than that, the machine is still very capable.

They are quite easy to cool at stock speed. To reduce noise, I removed the cover to my server, modified the fins on the existing heatsinks so that air could be pushed down through the top of the fins, and then laid a couple of 120mm fans on top of the heatsinks. The server is in a niche behind a curtain, so it does not have to look nice.

[uaf]

I would also consider Opterons 6XXX (socket G34).

They are slower than Intels but since each Opteron package contains 2 dies, each with its memory controller, a dual Opteron would have 4 NUMA nodes which could be useful for what you need.

Here's, for example, a dual Opteron 6172 (24 cores) with 48GB RAM for 150$:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Proliant-DL1 ... SwAYtWK-61

[Dann Corbit]

What's the cheapest NUMA machine one can buy for developing a modern NUMA-aware chess engine?

I paid about $600 for my 128 GB RAM 64 core AMD machine (used).
But it was so noisy, I paid $700 for a 24db sound reduction box to keep it in.

Still, $1300 is not bad.

On the other hand, I got an email from the electric company telling me that my electric power use was up. I did a calculation and I think it will cost me about $100 per month to do around the clock analysis. Probably more in the summer, because I will have to run the air conditioner.

The prices for those machines vary enormously. I have seen prices for the machine I bought between $20,000 and $700 since then. I got free shipping, but the thing is heavy as a tank, so shipping is probably a concern.

[jdart]

I used to have a 1U rack server, but those things are also very noisy. They are designed to sit in datacenters, not houses. Mine was in the basement, so not audible though.

Electric power is also a concern. The SF Bay Area has extremely high electric rates and the rate goes up as your usage increases. I started dialing back usage and shutting down idle machines after I had a $400 bill one recent month.

--Jon