[Beowulf] Odd AMD quad core SuperMicro power off issues

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 12:13:49AM -0500, Gerry Creager wrote:
> I learned recently that, regardless of the versioing, it's VERY 
> important with SuperMicro to check the BIOS date.
> 
> Much more important than I'd thought.  As in, that's the real release 
> info on the BIOS.

I've had issues with spontaneous lockups on Windows 2003 Server
(no BSOD, gray screen with no login, the mouse was responsive, 
but nothing else) on an Opteron Supermicro (H8SMI-2/BULK). 
The thing also has Oracle on it with a custom cartridge,
and many weird proprietary things on it. Haven't tried it
with Linux yet.

I've reflashed the BIOS, which hasn't changed anything.
The hardware monitoring applications for Windows Supermicro
ships is surprisingly awful. It also filled the logs with
spurious hardware failures (every component failed, according
to the log) and broke OLE embedding on that machine.

Anecdotally, a reseller mentioned that board has issues.
I'll follow up on this in the next week or two, and report,
if I find something.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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