Recently I got more and more requests for PPC64 packages, both for Packman and other openSUSE repositories. I don't have any PPC64 hardware to compile these packages, and even more importantly: test and troubleshoot the compiled packages.

To make it quick: I'd be more than happy to compile these packages, if somebody would donate me a PPC64 computer, like a PS3 or PowerStation for local use. Remote access would not be much use for me, as testing and troubleshooting multimedia apps remotely is not possible. It would also double my work maintaining repositories, and in the case of PS3 would make the use of openSUSE BuildService impossible.

Thanks!

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

ping...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

you can get cheap PowerMac G5's on ebay. ;-)

Yeah, and half a year later, Apples G5 are done ... broken ...

I really don't understand IBM!

How to program for PowerPC, if no hardware is available?

sad isnt it. i still have hopes for something like efika with a little more power.

a beowulf cluster of wii's, perhaps? : )

btw, a beowulf cluster of efikas would be even better, economy-wise.

just imagine - a mini blue gene : )

apropos, i'm not even kidding.

Pff Beowulf... real people cluster with OpenMP these days.

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Matt Sealey

Well, right now I have enough 32bit PPC build power (OK, it is never enough, but that's another question :-) ), even without clustering my EFIKAs. My single MPC8610 is faster than 1 Pegasos + 3 EFIKAs combined.

Mac G5: Karl is right, people get rid of it usually a few weeks before EoL, when there are already signs, that it is nearing...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

GREEEEEEED!

Really? I've never seen problems. And I have bought four PowerMac G5s so far. (bigger, better and faster ones each time ;-) )

Now I use the powerstation and it is a really nice machine! It's even cheaper than PowerMacs were, when they were new.

allow me to express my sincere doubt about that. what class of tasks are you running - something memory-throughput-bound?
bah, these days.. nothing beats the good ol' days.

Software compiling for a couple of SuSE releases in parallel. From the Ghz point of view, the 8610 is already Pegasos Ghz + EFIKa Ghz. But it also has at least 3x faster RAM and HDD access (30x, when compared to the EFIKA). Distributing compile tasks also have heavy networking overhead.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

wait, is that pegasos 74xx or 750? if it's the former then that alone should give you 8610-levels MIPS, and 3x efika should add some extra 2300 MIPS - that deciseviely outdoes a singe 8610 for purely-computational, distributed tasks. memory-throughput-wise the 8610 likely outclasses the efikas handily (and that is before considering the big L2$), but still, i'm not sure that a task such as compilation would be so heavily biased toward mem throughput, that an 8610 would outdo an 1x 74xx + 3x 603e cluster. maybe you're heavily disk-bound (read: swap-bound) during that build? apropos, did you try distcc for the distrubuted builds? if you did, i'm curious about the observed cluster performance.

I tesed it with IceCream: http://en.opensuse.org/Icecream Adding an EFIKA to the Pegasos actually slowed compiling down. Adding my Core2Duo sped up compiling consierably.
When compiling on the Pegasos, doing a second compile in parallel almost doubles compile time. On the 8610, adding a third compile still increases compile time just to about 1.5x.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/