Ultra 20 crashes (WARNING: MCE 0: error code ...)

Hello iCreate,

short story:

I didn't upgrade, but ordered with the 180 built in.

long story:

Looking at the sun website, it listed the large configuration of the Ultra 20 with the 180. When proceeding to ordering, the website showed the 152.

I phoned them about this and they said "Hm, strange. What do you want to buy?" . What I needed was something with 2 processors, so I could run some development and production at the same time. I had also considered the small version of the Ultra 40, which, after upgrading to 2 Opteron 246 and 2 GB, costs around the same as the Ultra 20 large.

However, some colleagues bought a x4100 and x2100 (2x246 / 1x175) respectively and it turned out that for my application the x2100 was faster.

Since the lady on the phone assured me that I can get a 180 in the Ultra 20, I opted for that.

I'm with an educational institution and got a 5% discount (My colleague needed a new workstation to, so, since the HP Alphas were ~60000 $, he went for the Ultra 40. He configured 580 GB of diskspace and paid only 300$ more than me. But this might have worked only because our computing centre buys some Sun stuff regularly.)

The order was placed mid February. I got two mails (beginning of March and April) "that the part number will become available mid March and mid April". I felt a bit like the guy with "the sun don't shine on me (http://joyeur.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-me) but after a while and whining on the phone and asking to speak to a manager, things started moving in end of April. I guess this is the place to thank J. Nelson for making things happen.

The reason of the delay wasn't entirely clear to me. One person told me that the 180 is a new component and the Operational Health and Safety issues had to be worked on (component compliance). OK, this is now speculation, but in the release notes it mentioned that some 64bit Kernels (the SuSE enterprise) would panic when installing 4 GB of main memory.

When the machine was finally delivered two weeks ago, the memory was faulty (but I did not realise until last weekend, where I ran some jobs on both processors and the temperature got up). Thanks to the included diagnostic software (PcCheck), the problem was found pretty quick. I phoned, received a process number and got called within one hour. Mr Mitchell enquired about what was going on and I gave him the diagnostic output of the memory tests. He asked whether I would be able to install the memory myself of have someone do it for me, and I opted for someone coming around (in case it's not the memory). Indeed, the man showed up the next day, installed the dimms and ran the check again, now without failure.

I'm running some stuff on the box right now, so keep your fingers crossed.

So, if you can get some educational discount, take also a look at the Ultra40. It's beautifully built (even nicer than the 20), although it runs a bit slower, but you have the option of going up to 16 MB.

On the downside is the noise level. Since the thing is intended to run at 100% load at least 50% of the time, it's a bit of an issue. I've put it below my desk, so it's hushed a bit.

Hope this helps,

Cheers, Peter.

PS: After keeping the machine at load around 2.0 for 5 days continuously, it appears as if the problem has been retired by replacing the memory.

niessepe at 2007-7-6 15:48:27 >