Fermilab Farm Evaluation Testing
Farm Evaluations
As much as we like all of our vendors, we still would rather be safe than sorry.
So we go through testing of their machines.
There is two levels of evaluations.
- Qualify
We don't send our bids our for farm workers to just any PC manufacturer. We
have to evaluate them and see if their hardware will work up to our standards, and
also if the vendors will give us what we asked for. We do this test about once every
year and half or so.
So we get a list of vendors (last time it was 18), give them our criteria for
a farm worker and have them send us an evaluation machine. We then take this machine
and run it through our test suite for 7 days.
We then take the best 5 or 6 vendors and put them on our qualified list. One thing
that suprised folk is that we don't have any of the very large name vendors on our list.
This is primarily because they tend to tell us what we want instead of the other way
around.
- Burn-in
After a vendor is on our qualified vendor list, we then have to bid all of
purchases through that list. For the most part the lowest bidder wins the bid (the
exception is that there are often quotes that don't match what we asked for.)
When these machines come here, we do a 30 day burn-in, where all of our
testing programs run for the whole 30 days. There are all sorts of rules that
set what qualifies and what doesn't. It might seem extreme that we expect a
98% uptime (and any time down in a day counts as a day) but we've found that
good vendors can meet this without too much worry.
We have packaged our suite of tests into a user friendly, easy to install,
burn in test. We put all of the packages into rpm format so that they can quickly
installed and unistalled. We also made a few utilities that would made
monitoring easier.
For those who want to try our tests to see if their hardware is able to run
our tests here are the packages.
fermitest-full
- All the tests and utilities, requires any setting up that the tests need
fermitest-seti **
- No setting up needed
fermitest-bonnie
- Have drives mounted on /local/stage1,2,3...
fermitest-net
- No setting up for client
fermitest-util
- Need proper motherboard for temperature checking
Many people come to this site because of our high standing in the SetiAtHome status. It's actually
pretty amazing how high up in the standings we are when we only run these tests every few months. But
what is even more amazing is how fast we drop in the rankings when we arn't running the tests.
Dec 1999 We were 22 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 50,000 work units completed.
July 1, 2000 We were 34 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 67,000 work units completed.
August 1, 2000 We have dropped to 37 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 67,500 work units completed.
October 5, 2000 We have dropped to 51 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 68,600 work units completed.
November 5, 2000 We climbed up to 39 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 87,000 work units completed.
June 25, 2001 We have dropped to 62 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 98,500 work units completed.
September 25, 2001 A dramatic climb to 39 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 131,333 work units completed.
September 27, 2002 We have dropped again to 63 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 181,230 work units completed.
November 15, 2002 An amazing climb up to 22 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 245,216 work units completed.
December 30, 2002 We still climb up to 20 in
Top SetiAtHome Users with 293,081 work units completed. With this last burst
of strength we finolly beat the average and move be default into the top spot. That doesn't make
sense (and I'll probrubly rewrite that sentance) but take a look at this on our
seti page
Your rank out of 4167163 total users is: 20th place.
The number of users who have this rank: 1
You have completed more work units than 100.000% of our users.
** The SetiAtHome rpm was pulled off this site as the License for SetiAtHome
clearly states that Distribution is prohibited. If you are one of our test
vendors and need this software, please contact me.
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November 15, 2002