this is day two of isolation with a sore throat and you're gonna be able to tell
how long i've been at home by how long my facial hair gets but that doesn't
mean we're gonna stop making videos so we did a folding at home call to arms
last week where we had people contribute computing power from their desktop
machines to help run protein folding simulations to help in the fight against
covid19 among other diseases but as we
mentioned in that video one of the main problems the folding project is having
right now is not necessarily that there's not enough willing volunteers to
contribute their compute power but that there's not enough servers to intake all
the data so we said we were going to work with the folding guys to build
ourselves a folding at home target
server and put it in our server room that's what i'm going to be doing here
at home today and i've got one of our old decommissioned servers along with a
care package from Jake that i'm going to be opening up using to upgrading it and
then lysoling the heck out of this thing and sending it back to him and the video
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device with glasswire use offer code Linus to get 25 off glass wire at the
link in the video description so it's pretty obvious what all the volunteer
contributors like you are doing for the folding at home project but many of you
probably won't know what role the server plays in all this so here's the thing
when you're folding your machine says hey i need a job to work on what the
server does is it says all right i've got a spot available go ahead and
connect to me i'm going to generate a job for you send it off to you then you
go ahead you crunch those numbers and the job is ready to submit and the
server says okay i'm ready for you you send it back and it stores it until the
researchers who are working on the folding at home project are ready to
grab it and do something with it so for that to work you actually need a few
things one is a decent amount of CPU
power folding at home recommends an eight core CPU which we actually do have
but uh for a couple of reasons i'll get into later we're gonna be upgrading the
one in here it's a little pinner they also recommend about 64 gigabytes
of RAM that's gonna let us handle anywhere from a thousand to twelve
hundred clients connected to our machine the other things we're gonna need are a
buttload of storage in order to hold those completed jobs and of course a
fast internet connection in order to connect to all those clients so because
we've got 10 gigabit Ethernet already built into this motherboard we don't
need to make any upgrades there but we do need to swap out the 32 gigs of RAM
we've got in here that eight core CPU and of course we're going to need to add
some storage let's start with our CPU the xeon e3 2618 lv3 that we've got in
here was just fine for basic file server
duties especially given that we were running a raid card in here when we
originally deployed it so the CPU didn't even have to handle any storage parity
calculations or anything like that but it's only got a 2.3 gigahertz base clock
which means that if we're actually loaded up with you know somewhere over a
thousand clients that thing is going to be running darn near base speeds not to
mention that folding at home recommends a gigabit internet connection and we are
actually going to be running 10 gig and we're hoping to provision off anywhere
between about 4 gigabit and 5 gigabit of
our internet connection to run to this machine so we want to see this thing
melt if we can get away with it let's pull out this chip and now seems like as
good a time as any to open up my care package from jakku
what do we got in here this is looking like pretty good stuff
here's our two power cables for the redundant power supply that's already
built into this machine a vga cable so we can test it make sure it actually
powers on after our upgrade oh shoot these RAM sticks got kicked around a
little bit 32 gig registered ecc memory modules so that's
going to give us a total of 128 gigs of RAM in our completed config
i will explain why we need so much a little bit later i've got some
thermal paste
some screws and this seems like there's more than just an optane SSD in it ah there it is
all right so we are upgrading to an e5
2697 v3 that is a high performance 14
core 28 thread processor or at least it
was a few years back nowadays it's not really anything special but it should be
more than enough for what we're doing here today go ahead get that installed
it's so nice he included a little cleaning pad but he also sent me a clean
CPU so i'm not gonna bother with that i love these thick boy thermal paste
tubes look at that it's a hand for scale i mean it's a small hand but you know
how it is oh wow that's a lot uh uh well the good
news is we're not likely to run out anytime soon
this is a very early unit of this motherboard super micro actually sent us
i think it was one of the first ones off the line for this thing because it was
one of their first matx server boards that had 10 gig Ethernet built in 10 gig
used to be more of like uh well you why wouldn't you just use an add-in card for
that and it's become over the last few years an option to have just
pre-built into the motherboard and our CPU upgrade is done now let's
talk about the storage folding at home recommends about 50 terabytes of storage
for one of these servers but because our network connection and our CPU not to
mention our memory are all beefed up we could quite possibly need more than
that so we're configuring ours with eight of these 12 terabyte ironwolf pro
nas drives from seagate that's going to give us about 96 terabytes of raw space
or 72 once we give up two of our drives for parity and then once we've formatted
about 60 terabytes of usable storage
fortunately this case is super easy to install drives in it's actually one of
the only things that i really really like
about it you just pop these open slide them in
no tools no sleds no nothing just
boom just like that that takes care of our capacity but these are mechanical
drives and even in zfs raid they're not
going to be particularly fast so believe it or not that's where our overkill
memory upgrade comes in so we're going to be using 64 gigs of
our RAM to meet the recommended specs from folding at home but we're going to
be using the other 64 gigs to actually
act as an arc or a or a cache for our
mechanical drives these are going to be running in a quad
channel configuration so we should have plenty of bandwidth and uh i don't know
whatever i haven't shouted out kingston for sending these to us in a long time
they actually sent them originally for the six workstations one CPU project but
we have used them for tons of things and they've worked basically anything we've
put them in so good on them for that you guys probably noticed though that
inside that optane box there was also an actual Intel optane 905p 960 gig SSD
this is gonna act as a level 2 arc so
between our RAM and this SSD we are hoping to accelerate our mechanical
storage array quite significantly alleviating any performance bottlenecks
that we could run into there where's my screwdriver so we're just
going to take one of these open pci express
gen 3 8x slots i was going to put it in
the next slot over but i realized that puts it right up against the edge of the chassis and there's no cooling fan there
so probably better off sitting next to the hba and having a cooling fan near it
as opposed to being farther away from another heat source but not having any
direct cooling one thing we're not changing is this hba the difference
between an hba and a raid card is that an hba doesn't have a CPU built into it
to handle raid calculations it's just a card that adds more ports to your
motherboard in this case eight 12 gigabit per second sas ports even though
we're only running them at SATA six gigabit per second through this back
plane over here that's it then for the hardware upgrades and it all comes down
to software configuration to decide how best to use it so one of the things we
could do is instead of using 64 gigs of our memory to accelerate our hard drives
we might cordon off just 32 gigs for that giving ourselves the capability to
handle over 1500 clients that's something that those extra CPU cores
might come in handy for or we might realize that we're better off using our
extra CPU horsepower to enable real-time data compression to our hard drives like
maybe we run into a network limitation or some other system limitation and
realize we just don't have enough storage guys that's something that you
can do with cfs for now though all that remains
close this puppy up there we go screw it together
and give the whole thing a good lysol wipe down i like Jake he's a good guy he
can have the uh lemon scented wipes
this is gonna be like the best smelling server ever
hopefully matthias is here to pick it up and we'll send it back to the office
okay let me open this okay so i don't actually have the rails
for this server so we're just going to sit it on top of this storinator
it's kind of ghetto but whatever i also don't have a screwdriver so i'm not
going to look at what Linus did but i kind of know what it is already
and for a little server she sure is heavy there we go
okay hey he gave me the cables back noise
he stole the thermal face though what the
heck okay we got power
plug one in for ipmi so we can remote control this thing
uh oh right i need a display
do we even have spaces left on this thing
sweet okay i gotta try and find this back here so this is p
where do these cables even come from
should probably label this right yeah
i'll leave that for the next person hey it's working
let's make sure everything's here 110
28 gigs of RAM everything else it's working
yes like Linus mentioned earlier we're going to be using something called zfs for our
hard drive array so not only does it do the work of a file system by controlling
how your data is stored and retrieved but it also handles how all the physical
or virtual disks are partitioned and works to ensure the integrity of the
data on said drives now that we've installed zfs and verified that it's
actually working we're going to create our z pool now we're going to be using something called raid z2 which is
actually based on raid 5 but it's going to allow us to lose two total drives
before we lose any data i've already kind of pre-configured the command
written out all the disk name so we don't have to wait for that and i've also defined our cache in here which
means we're going to have that 905p working right off the bat so just copy
this command in there paste enter and yeah
okay let's check our z pool list now that it's should be in there we see 87
terabytes which is a little lower than 96 but you know drive partitioning and
what have you and then if we run dfh
we can see we actually end up with 60 terabytes of usable space that's a
little bit down from 96 but it should be plenty for what we're trying to do
there's still a couple more things we need to check off the list before we can install our folding software namely i
want to set our arc cache to a max of 64 gigs and then i'm going to enable
compression because i think it's going to be fine with the 14 cores we have i
think realistically our network is going to be our bottleneck but we'll enable it
for now and if down the road we have to turn it off no big deal
now as a sort of last step i'm just going to kind of look at our z pool so
we're going to do z pool status folding and we can see all eight of our drives
one two three four five six seven eight and our cash drive are all there and
ready to go and we have no errors which is perfect
in order for folders to actually be able to access our folding server i've
created some firewall rules now that was pretty easy but we're also going to create something called a traffic
limiter because we don't want this folding server to eat up all of our 10
gigs of bandwidth so we're going to limit it to 5 gigabit but i'm going to show you guys how this works on the
laptop as a baseline i'm going to run a speed test on the system before we
enable the traffic limiter so you can actually see the difference
okay we have our results in and we're looking at 230 down and 200 up so i
think i'm going to limit it to 5 megabit which will be a very stark change and
you should be able to see it right away so we're going to go into our two rules
here it's already set to megabit so we'll do 5 and then we'll go to our in
set that to five and then apply and then
we just need to find our ip which i already did so
10.20.3.35 for this laptop so i'll just go add the rule in so here's our results
and yeah five megabit right on the dot ish
so now we're gonna change this over to five gigabit and then set it up on our
actual server now that we've got our z pool configured and working we've got
our bandwidth limiter and our firewall rules set up it's just a matter of
calling the folding guys and getting them to install the software so we can get this work server going
well it's been a week and as you can see my isolation facial hair is quite long
and this is great i've got jakku on the line and we're going to be checking out
how well our folding server is running so Jake give me the good news well the
good news is there's enough work units for most people now which is great did
we help with that or was that just serendipitous yes but it's not only us
helping so they've also got microsoft azure i think they donated some servers
um oracle you know the guys that make java and lots of other things they're
doing stuff too and then there's us but uh if we look on the stats here we can
definitely see that our server does have jobs available which means work units
are available nice 19 000 jobs i mean for the first like five days it was up
there was basically nothing because they just couldn't create enough projects it
was no longer the servers but the people that were the ben or the bottleneck so
how we doing now how much usage have we got i was kind of expecting more to be
honest but if we look at the past history you can see like
they spike up quite a bit so like right there is half a gigabit and then that's
600 and then if we scroll out actually
so that's like 1.6 gigabit wow so from
my understanding these actual like spikes a lot of the time are actually
when the different work servers are like communicating with each other the actual
like network bandwidth of individual clients connecting isn't too much but
it's when they're trying to talk together that it really starts to hurt and how much storage have we used so far
last i checked this morning it was already like two and a half or three
terabytes of storage used that's awesome and we can look at our zfs stats here
which actually paints a little bit more of a picture so our RAM cache i set to
64 gigs is completely full you can see it's it's ramping up slowly filling so
as things are being removed from the RAM cache when they would normally get
dumped back to the disks they actually go to the level two cache instead
so this is already up to 64 or 40 gigs
and it's only been like an hour or something since i reset it so it does
take a few days to fill obviously because it's only filling up with stuff that's being removed from the primary
cash but um fantastic and hey i've actually got an update for you so we
have created an exclusive folding at home shirt design
and all profits from the shirts are going to be contributed to causes within
canada around the research relief and treatment of covet 19. so you guys are
going to have to check that out at lttstore.com and
what's really cool is Intel is going to match
every dollar raised dollar for dollar to a maximum of 40 grand and so that 40
grand is actually going to go directly to the folding project so they can get
servers and stuff right yes that's correct oh apparently you already knew
about this i did already know yes this is actually like one of my favorite
shirt designs and the qr code on the back takes you to our our team stats on
extreme overclocking dot
so join the cause guys we're gonna leave this server running for the foreseeable
future i'll let you go now Jake and uh
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have it linked in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video maybe check out our
previous part of this video where we built a monster client folding machine
as opposed to a server that's some really good stuff too