 This is day two of isolation with a sore throat. You're gonna be able to tell how long I've been at home by how long my facial hair gets, but that doesn't mean we're gonna stop making videos. So we did a folding at home call to arms last week, where we had people contribute computing power from their desktop machines to help run protein folding simulations to help in the fight against COVID-19, among other diseases. But as we mentioned in that video, one of the main problems the folding project is having right now is not necessarily that there's not enough willing volunteers to contribute their compute power, but that there's not enough servers to intake all the data. So we said we were gonna work with the folding guys to build ourselves a folding at home target server and put it in our server room. That's what I'm gonna be doing here at home today, and I've got one of our old decommissioned servers, along with a care package from Jake that I'm gonna be opening up, using to upgrading it and then lice-a-ling the heck out of this thing and sending it back to him. And the video is brought to you by GlassWire. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with GlassWire. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link in the video description. So it's pretty obvious what all the volunteer contributors like you are doing for the folding at home project, but many of you probably won't know what role the server plays in all this. So here's the thing, when you're folding, your machine says, hey, I need a job to work on. What the server does is it says, all right, I've got a spot available, go ahead and connect to me. I'm gonna generate a job for you, send it off to you. Then you go ahead, you crunch those numbers and the job is ready to submit. And the server says, OK, I'm ready for you. You send it back and it stores it until the researchers who are working on the folding at home project are ready to grab it and do something with it. So for that to work, you actually need a few things. One is a decent amount of CPU power. Folding at home recommends an eight core CPU, which we actually do have, but for a couple of reasons I'll get into later, we're gonna be upgrading the one in here. It's a little pinner. They also recommend about 64 gigabytes of RAM. That's gonna let us handle anywhere from a thousand to twelve hundred clients connected to our machine. The other things we're gonna need are a buttload of storage in order to hold those completed jobs. And of course, a fast internet connection in order to connect to all those clients. So because we've got 10 gigabit ethernet already built into this motherboard, we don't need to make any upgrades there, but we do need to swap out the 32 gigs of RAM we've got in here, that eight core CPU, and of course, we're gonna need to add some storage. Let's start with our CPU. The Xeon E3 2618Lv3 that we've got in here was just fine for basic file server duties, especially given that we were running a raid card in here when we originally deployed it, so the CPU didn't even have to handle any storage parity calculations or anything like that. But it's only got a 2.3 gigahertz base clock, which means that if we're actually loaded up with, you know, somewhere over a thousand clients, that thing is gonna be running darn near base speeds. Not to mention that Folding at Home recommends a gigabit internet connection, and we are actually gonna be running 10 gig, and we're hoping to provision off anywhere between about four gigabit and five gigabit of our internet connection to run to this machine. So we want to see this thing melt if we can get away with it. Let's pull out this chip, and now seems like as good a time as any to open up my care package from Jakku. What do we got in here? Ooh, this is looking like pretty good stuff. Here's our two power cables for the redundant power supply that's already built into this machine. A VGA cable so we can test it, make sure it actually powers on after our upgrade. Oh, shoot! These RAM sticks got kicked around a little bit. 32 gig registered ECC memory modules, so that's gonna give us a total of 128 gigs of RAM in our completed config. I will explain why we need so much a little bit later. Got some thermal paste. Some screws. And this seems like there's more than just an Optane SSD in it. Ah, there it is. All right, so we are upgrading to an E5-2697v3. That is a high-performance 14-core 28-thread processor, or at least it was a few years back. Nowadays, it's not really anything special, but it should be more than enough for what we're doing here today. Go ahead, get that installed. It's so nice, he included a little cleaning pad, but he also sent me a clean CPU, so I'm not gonna bother with that. I love these thick boy thermal paste tubes. Look at that. It's a hand for scale. I mean, it's a small hand, but you know how it is. Oh, wow, that's a lot. Ah, ah, well, the good news is we're not likely to run out anytime soon. This is a very early unit of this motherboard. Supermicro actually sent us, I think it was one of the first ones off the line for this thing, because it was one of their first MATX server boards that had 10 gig ethernet built in. 10 gig used to be more of like a, well, why wouldn't you just use an add-in card for that? And it's become, over the last few years, an option to have just pre-built into the motherboard. And our CPU upgrade is done. Now let's talk about the storage. Folding at home recommends about 50 terabytes of storage for one of these servers, but because our network connection and our CPU, not to mention our memory, are all beefed up, we could quite possibly need more than that. So we're configuring ours with eight of these 12 terabyte Iron Wolf Pro NAS drives from Seagate. That's going to give us about 96 terabytes of raw space, or 72, once we give up two of our drives for parity, and then once we've formatted, about 60 terabytes of usable storage. Fortunately, this case is super easy to install drives in. It's actually one of the only things that I really, really like about it. You just pop these open, slide them in, no tools, no sleds, no nothing, just boom, just like that. That takes care of our capacity, but these are mechanical drives, and even in ZFS RAID, they're not going to be particularly fast. So believe it or not, that's where our overkill memory upgrade comes in. So we're going to be using 64 gigs of our RAM to meet the recommended specs from folding at home, but we're going to be using the other 64 gigs to actually act as an arc or a cache for our mechanical drives. These are going to be running in a quad channel configuration, so we should have plenty-o bandwidth. And I don't know, whatever, I haven't shouted out Kingston for sending these to us in a long time. They actually sent them originally for the 6 Workstations 1 CPU project, but we have used them for tons of things, and they've worked in basically anything we've put them in, so good on them for that. You guys probably noticed, though, that inside that Optane box, there was also an actual Intel Optane 905P 960 gig SSD. This is going to act as a level 2 arc. So between our RAM and this SSD, we are hoping to accelerate our mechanical storage array quite significantly, alleviating any performance bottlenecks that we could run into there. Where's my screwdriver? So we're just going to take one of these OpenPCI Express Gen 3 8x slots. I was going to put it in the next slot over, but I realized that puts it right up against the edge of the chassis, and there's no cooling fan there, so probably better off sitting next to the HBA and having a cooling fan near it, as opposed to being farther away from another heat source, but not having any direct cooling. One thing we're not changing is this HBA. The difference between an HBA and a RAID card is that an HBA doesn't have a CPU built into it to handle RAID calculations. It's just a card that adds more ports to your motherboard, in this case, 8 12 gigabit per second SAS ports, even though we're only running them at, say, a 6 gigabit per second through this backplane over here. That's it, then, for the hardware upgrades, and it all comes down to software configuration to decide how best to use it. So one of the things we could do is instead of using 64 gigs of our memory to accelerate our hard drives, we might cordon off just 32 gigs for that, giving ourselves the capability to handle over 1500 clients. That's something that those extra CPU cores might come in handy for. Or we might realize that we're better off using our extra CPU horsepower to enable real-time data compression to our hard drives, like maybe we run into a network limitation or some other system limitation, and realize we just don't have enough storage, guys. That's something that you can do with CFS. For now, though, all that remains... Alright. Close this puppy up. There we go. Screw it together. And give the whole thing a good Lysol wipe down. I like Jake. He's a good guy. He can have the lemon-scented wipes. This is gonna be, like, the best smelling server ever. Hopefully, Matthias is here to pick it up, and we'll send it back to the office. Mm, mm, mm, mm. Okay, let me open this. Okay, so I don't actually have the rails for this server, so we're just gonna sit it on top of this store-inator. It's kind of ghetto, but whatever. I also don't have a screwdriver, so I'm not gonna look at what Linus did, but I kind of know what it is already. Man, for a little server, she sure is heavy. There we go. Oh. Whew. Okay. Hey, he gave me the cables back. Noise. He stole the thermal paste, though. What the... What the heck? Okay, we got power. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. ****. Plug one in for IPMI so we can remote control this thing. Uh, oh, right. I need a display. Do we even have spaces left on this thing? Sweet. Okay, I gotta try and find this back here, so this is P. Where do these cables even come from? Ooh. Should probably label this for it. Eh. I'll leave that for the next person. Hey, it's working. Let's make sure everything's here. 110 slash 28 gigs of RAM. Everything else? It's working. Yes. Like Linus mentioned earlier, we're gonna be using something called ZFS for our hard drive array. So not only does it do the work of a file system by controlling how your data is stored and retrieved, but it also handles how all the physical or virtual disks are partitioned and works to ensure the integrity of the data on said drives. Now that we've installed ZFS and verified that it's actually working, we're gonna create our Zpool. Now, we're gonna be using something called RAID Z2, which is actually based on RAID 5, but it's gonna allow us to lose two total drives before we lose any data. I've already kind of pre-configured the command, written out all the disk names, so we don't have to wait for that. And I've also defined our cache in here, which means we're gonna have that 905P working right off the bat. So just copy this command in there, paste, enter, and yeah. Okay, let's check our Zpool list now that it should be in there. We see 87 terabytes, which is a little lower than 96, but you know, drive partitioning and what have you. And then if we run DFH, we can see we actually end up with 60 terabytes of usable space. That's a little bit down from 96, but it should be plenty for what we're trying to do. There's still a couple more things we need to check off the list before we can install our folding software. Namely, I wanna set our ARC cache to a max of 64 gigs, and then I'm gonna enable compression, because I think it's gonna be fine with the 14 cores we have. I think realistically our network is gonna be our bottleneck, but we'll enable it for now, and if down the road we have to turn it off, no big deal. Now as a sort of last step, I'm just gonna kinda look at our Zpool. So we're gonna do Zpool status, folding, and we can see all eight of our drives, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and our cache drive are all there, and ready to go, and we have no errors, which is perfect. In order for folders to actually be able to access our folding server, I've created some firewall rules, and that was pretty easy, but we're also gonna create something called the traffic limiter, because we don't want this folding server to eat up all of our 10 gigs of bandwidth, so we're gonna limit it to 5 gigabit, but I'm gonna show you guys how this works on the laptop. As a baseline, I'm gonna run a speed test on the system before we enable the traffic limiter, so you can actually see the difference. Okay, we have our results in, and we're looking at 230 down and 200 up. So I think I'm gonna limit it to 5 megabit, which will be a very stark change, and you should be able to see it right away. We're gonna go into our two rules here. It's already set to megabit, so we'll do five, and then we'll go to our end, set that to five, and then apply, and then we just need to find our IP, which I already did, so 10.20.3.35 for this laptop. So I'll just go add the rule in. So here's our results, and yeah, 5 megabit right on the dot-ish. So now we're gonna change this over to 5 gigabit, and then set it up on our actual server. Now that we've got our zpool configured and working, we've got our bandwidth limiter and our firewall rules set up. It's just a matter of calling the folding guys and getting them to install the software so we can get this work server going. Well, it's been a week, and as you can see, my isolation facial hair is quite long, and this is great. I've got Jakku on the line, and we're gonna be checking out how well our folding server is running. So Jake, give me the good news. Well, the good news is there's enough work units for most people now, which is great. Did we help with that, or was that just serendipitous? Yes, but it's not only us helping. So they've also got Microsoft Azure. I think they donated some servers. Oracle, you know, the guys that make Java and lots of other things, they're doing stuff too. And then there's us, but if we look on the stats here, we can definitely see that our server does have jobs available, which means work units are available. Nice, 19,000 jobs. I mean, for the first five days it was up, there was basically none because they just couldn't create enough projects. It was no longer the servers, but the people that were the bend or the bottleneck. So how are we doing now? How much usage have we got? I was kind of expecting more, to be honest, but if we look at the past history, you can see like... Ooh. They spike up quite a bit. So like right there is half a gigabit and then that's 600. And then if we scroll out, actually, so that's like 1.6 gigabit. Wow. So from my understanding, these actual spikes, a lot of the time, are actually when the different work servers are like communicating with each other. The actual network bandwidth of individual clients connecting isn't too much, but it's when they're trying to talk together that it really starts to hurt. And how much storage have we used so far? Last I checked this morning, it was already like two and a half or three terabytes of storage used. That's awesome. And we can look at our ZFS stats here, which actually paints a little bit more of a picture. So our RAM cache I set to 64 gigs is completely full. You can see it's ramping up slowly filling. So as things are being removed from the RAM cache, when they would normally get dumped back to the disks, they actually go to the level two cache instead. So this is already up to 64 or 40 gigs, and it's only been like an hour or something since I reset it. So it does take a few days to fill, obviously, because it's only filling up with stuff that's being removed from the primary cache. But fantastic. And hey, I've actually got an update for you. So we have created an exclusive folding at home shirt design. And all profits from the shirts are going to be contributed to causes within Canada around the research relief and treatment of COVID-19. So you guys are going to have to check that out at lttstore.com. And what's really cool is Intel is going to match every dollar raised dollar for dollar to a maximum of 40 grand. And so that 40 grand is actually going to go directly to the folding project so they can get servers and stuff, right? Yes, that's correct. Oh, apparently you already knew about this. I did already know, yes. This is actually like one of my favorite shirt designs. And the QR code on the back takes you to our team stats on extremeoverclocking.com. So join the cause, guys. We're going to leave the server running for the foreseeable future. I'll let you go now, Jake, and just share a word from our sponsors with the good viewers out there. Drop.com, the Koss GMR54X ISO gaming headset is the featured product this time around. These are audio file approved and based on a popular Koss headset that was custom engineered for immersive 3D sound, giving you positional cues for where your enemies are coming from. There are some changes made from the original. So they've reduced the tension in the lightweight headband for improved comfort. They include a cord splitter, inline microphone with remote, and a detachable boom mic. And the boom mic works with the PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and more without hassle. Get it today and new users who sign up on drop.com will get $20 off on this headset. We're going to have it linked in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoyed this video, maybe check out our previous part of this video where we built a monster client folding machine as opposed to a server. That's some really good stuff too.