Taking a Look Inside
As with most hardware at AnandTech, we needed to take a look inside to fully determine the capabilities of our V40z. Upon entry of the system, we are greeted with a diagram of the V40z quick reference on the back of the removable panel.
Click to enlarge.
With the exception of the removable top panel, the entire Sun Fire V40z can be disassembled completely without any tools. Locking mechanisms in strategic places assure that power supplies, bezels and hard drives stay in place when they should, but at the same time, to remove a critical component – even during operation – seems relatively easy. Without the main bank of internal fans, we can see the rear processors under their giant 4” copper heat sinks.
Click to enlarge.
We actually stumbled across a block diagram of the motherboard and daughterboard outlining most of the components that make up the Sun Fire V40z. We intend to go in detail about each of the components and their purpose.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Because of the 3U design of the Sun Fire, a motherboard and daughterboard design was needed to allow maintenance of the second set of Opteron processors. The processors on the daughterboard are referred to as the “forward” CPUs because they pull out of the front of our V40z. The “rear” processors are technically the CPU0 and CPU1 to our operating system and are located on the mainboard.
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tironside - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
I agree with dwnwrd. the lom part of it is not great for remote console etc. the lom that the hp stuff has is pretty slick, with a java / web interface. The other main problem I have with this is it offers only raid 1 unless you buy a rather expensive add on card to do raid 5, kind of a teaser to put 6 drive bays and only let you do raid 1... It's a good start, but sun needs to make some changes before it can go mission critical. (raid and lom enhancements imho) while I like cli stuff, trying to get junior people to do complicated cli stuff is dangerous...dwnwrd - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
I have some V20s and a V40. The service processor is pretty great except if you try to direct the Linux serial console to it then connect to the "serial over LAN" you'll get a flood of "serial8250: too much work for irq4" and a sleepy system.http://supportforum.sun.com/hardware/index.php?t=m...
Pontius - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
I am curious what they are using when they benchmark the linux kernel compile times. They use the time command which spits out three times - real, user & sys. Are they using the sum of all these? If not, something is wrong. Because I did the same test, on the same 2.6.4 kernel using -j2 on a dual 2.8GHz Nocona system and I got a "real" time of 147s. That doesn't seem right because the Opterons are way faster at compilation. On the other hand, if I take the sum of the 3 times, I get 420s. Any thoughts?jlee123 - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
RedHat 9, are you joking!!?? This has got to be a mistake, I can't understand how Sun could be shipping a 64-bit server with a 32-bit OS that's reached End Of Life. It's the equivalent of buying a workstation with Windows ME on it. Also, there was never a official port of RH9 to x86-64, the first x86-64 RedHat was RHEL3, the Fedora team later released FC1 x86-64. If Sun doesn't wish to pay licensing, they'd be better off shipping with FC2, FC3 or CentOS, a free rebuild of RHEL. This hardware isn't even going to begin to be utilized till it's running something more modern like RHEL4 x86-64.JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
I could think of one use for these. :)http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=...
lauwersw - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
Standard rule for parallel make is to use 2xnumber of processors available. This gives most optimal results to hide disk latencies and seems to be correct in most cases I've seen.phaxmohdem - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
Call me what you will, but I would like to see some quad/dual Xeon scores to compare to as well (along with price tages for comparison :) )And yes, If I were a rich man who knew what to do with that much computing power, I would have a dozen of these babies in my basement! Who needs women anymore once you have 48 Opteron x50 or x52 cpus humming at your disposal. And drool core? Ahhhhhhhhhhh.
JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
That thing is a BEAST.I have no idea what I'd do with a computer like that.
MrEMan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Kristopher,Thanks for the clarification about the reduced media tag.
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KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
RyanVM: The system used 850s.Kristopher