New servers in the colo, monster is being retired.

[Matthew Dillon]

We have three new servers in the colo now that will be taking most/all bulk
package building duties from monster and the two blades (muscles and
pkgbox64) that previously did the work.   Monster will be retired.   The
new servers are a dual-socket Xeon (sting) and two 3900X based systems
(thor and loki) which all together burn only around half the wattage that
monster burned (500W vs 1000W) and 3 times the performance.   That's at
least a 6:1 improvement in performance efficiency.

With SSD prices down significantly the new machines have all-SSDs.  These
new machines allow us to build dports binary packages for release, master,
and staged at the same time and reduces the full-on bulk build times for
getting all three done down from 2 weeks to 2 days.  It will allow us to
more promptly synchronize updates to ports with dports and get binary
packages up sooner.

--

Monster, our venerable 48-core quad-socket opteron is being retired.  This
was a wonderful dev machine for working on DragonFly's SMP algorithms over
the last 6+ years precisely because its inter-core and inter-socket
latencies were quite high.  If a SMP algorithm wasn't spot-on, you could
feel it.  Over the years DragonFly's performance on monster in doing things
like bulk builds increased radically as the SMP algorithms got better and
the cores became more and more localized.  This kept monster relevant far
longer than I thought it would be.

But we are at a point now where improvements in efficiency are just too
good to ignore.  Monster's quad-socket opteron (4  x 12 core 6168's) pulls
1000W under full load while a single Ryzen 3900X (12 core / 24 thread) in a
server configuration pulls only 150W, and is slightly faster on the same
workload to boot.

I would like to thank everyone's generous donations over the last few
years!  We burned a few thousand on the new machines (as well as the major
SSD upgrades we did to the blades) and made very good use of the money,
particularly this year as prices for all major components (RAM, SSDs, CPUs,
Mobos, etc) have dropped significantly.

-Matt
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