💻 Hello Old Friend, Talos II 💻

This was my first IBM POWER9 system, acquired in 2020 and built for home/desk use. Dual socket SMT4 Sforza, 144 threads, 256-512GB RAM, various storage/net/accelerators over the years. [1]

As expected, I fell in love and acquired four IBM Power System L922-2U [2], which are presently in the colo awaiting network rebuild (remote hands this time).

The Talos II has served a variety of purposes, with most of its time running FreeBSD PPC64le (&a bit of PPC64be for fun). Sometimes also Linux, back when I was tearing into qemu code for compiler optimization hypothesis testing, RTX GPU passthrough, +validating assumptions about qemu on P9/le handling amd64 & arm64 emulation.

So, out of storage! Into the rack! New user accounts! But first it needs updated OS drives (the 3x 64GB SATADOM in Raid-Z1 need to be repurposed), and a NIC (25G-DP CX-5 or X710-DA4).

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#Raptor_Computing_Systems_/_Raptor_Engineering
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#IBM

@dexter electricity comes next 🧠

#FreeBSD #Linux #POWER9 #PPC64le #IBM #RaptorTalos #FMT2 #colo #datacenter #onprem #homelab #hardware #engineering #goodtimes #sunday #meditation #whiteNoiseGeneratorsLulMeToSleep #WomenInTech #WomenInSTEM