The observatory was using two computers, one for the control room, and another in the telescope area. I utilised Remote Desktop from the control room to control the telescope computer. A power surge killed the ‘better’ computer in the control room, so it was time for an upgrade.
Meet Kronos. Named after the Klingon home-world.
I really wanted just a single computer to run everything in the observatory. I figured if I’m going to upgrade, might as well do it properly.
I wanted a machine that was not going to crash (ECC Ram), and was suitable for Pixinsight image processing, and was as bulletproof as possible – redundant hard drives.
After an exhaustive search of TradeMe for a server, I found a great deal for an old HP Proliant ML350 Generation 8 tower server. This machine appealed to me, because it used DDR3 ECC Ram (which is dirt cheap), had dual processors (loads of grunt), dual power supplies and had onboard RAID functionality (resilient).
The processors were pretty rubbish, so I searched on Aliexpress for some better ones. I happened across 2 x E5-2696v2 Xeon processors which run at 2.5GHz. Each CPU runs 12 cores 24 threads and provides a very acceptable 24000 passmark score. This is pretty fast, about the same speed as a Intel Core i9-10900K @ 3.70GHz, at a much cheaper price.
I found some cheap DDR3, ECC Ram on TradeMe, and boosted that up to 150GB, then I bought 13 x 600GB 2.5″ SAS Drives ($20 ea) to compliment the 3x1TB drives 2.5″ SAS drives already in it. I did all this over some time, waiting for the right deals to come up.
I had 2 x Nvidia Geforce GTX1080 graphics cards in Vulcan my main gaming PC, but many games don’t support SLI that well, so I figured I’d move one of those across to Kronos. I figured the graphics grunt would really help with Starry Night Pro 8 with the OpenGL drivers.
But I hit a problem, crazy weird graphics behaviour, screen flickering, windows errors…
Why? – because the dual 460W power supplies weren’t sufficient to power all of the components, the Nvidia GTX1080 is a power-hungry card – with the server already having two 125W processors and fully loaded with drives it was too much. So I picked up a couple of 750W redundant power supplies from TradeMe for $70 each, and that fixed the problem.
I configured the raid array with two volumes, 1 Raid5 (3x1TB) – that’s for programs. The second volume I configured as Raid60 (12x600gb) +1 drive spare. This will give me dual drive failure protection plus striping for performance. I will use this volume for the astrophotography images. I don’t want to lose them, and the volume needs to be performant for PixInsight.
The PC was booting fine, so I installed Windows 10, installed the drivers and it was all good. The beast really runs well and would make a pretty decent gaming rig in addition to its observatory duties. It is a bit noisy though with all the fans.
One advantage to the Samsung monitor on my desk is that it supports audio via HDMI and has an audio out port. This means I can plug in some active speakers, and avoids having to install an audio card (no default audio on the ML350pG8). The Nvidia GTX1080 card is running dual duty with it’s HD audio functionality.
Just need to install it in the observatory now…
Kirk out.