Month: June 2019

Now that the lab is (partly) updated. I’ve been updating my packer + ansible builds to take advantage of this new capacity. There is something awesome about being able to run a build script and have it build out all the vm’s and then call ansible to install and config a Cloudera cluster + the data science workbench.

Waiting for the new AMD cards to launch so I can pick up a cheap CUDA card (assuming the NV prices drop) for TesnsorFlow offload.

Looking forward now to the Zen2 cpu’s releasing to market so that I can see what I’m doing with the rest of the lab. Will it be a 12core Ryzen, Gen3 Threadripper, or perhaps an Epyc based system that joins this one? Who knows, all I do know is that the cpu market is interesting again now that AMD are revitalised. I look forward to what real competition will bring from AMD and Intel now they are competing again.

Time to upgrade my homelab. It was time for my old C2750D4I Avoton server to retire as it was getting too slow for my needs. Now that a re-emergent AMD has helped give the x86 market a much needed kick in the pants, there are a lot more options than when I last upgraded the lab.

The details are :-

Whitebox home built, Ryzen 2700 based, eight core (sixteen thread) server with 64gb of ram (ASRock X470D4U motherboard). Two 2TB SSD drives provide local storage options and I plan to chuck a 10GBE card and a CUDA card into it so I can model some “big data” solutions in my lab.

This is just the first phase of my home lab upgrades as Zen2 is going to come out in a month or so and I’m looking forward to upgrading some more of my servers to Ryzen 3000 series cpus or to the Zen2 based Threadripper cpus when they hit the market.