[Beowulf] ECC support on motherboards?

Joe Landman landman at scalableinformatics.com
Mon May 12 18:03:56 PDT 2008


Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com> writes:
>>> I've been reading spec sheets, and they often don't tell you, which is
>>> rather annoying. Thus my question.
>> I just randomly selected 2 motherboards from 2 different vendors and
>> on both spec sheets, they clearly defined which memory they took.
> 
> Oh, sheets will tell you that they *take* ECC memory, but long
> experience says that the motherboards that actually properly do ECC
> scrubbing are a subset -- some boards will accept the extra ECC bits
> and do nothing with them! Generally speaking, the only reliable way

Heh... you want motherboards that work?  Different question :(

> I've found to determine if the ECC stuff works is to look at the BIOS
> ECC settings, but often that info seems to be missing from the
> manuals.

Sadly, the bios ECC settings on a number of MB's appear to be busted in 
some cases ...  well, ok, the bios setup of the ECC system appears to be 
busted.  At least most will signal an MCE these

> 
> Anyway, I was asking for a reason. :)

Heh ... which MBs are you considering, or conversely, which ones are you 
trying to deal with?

> 
> 


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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