For sale!

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Not that we can think of. We have "wire OCD" as well, so we can sympathize with your plight.

Maybe wire in a giant capacitor like they use on air conditioning units? (We got buzzed by one of those once. Apparently they need to be discharged before you replace them. Lesson learned!)

Found something promising here - the main page is annoying in that it doesn't give the key VA/Watt data(although the model numbers encode the VA), but the Geek.com review linked there has that info:

Smart Internal Series SI-300/550/600

SI series is the industries first and only uninterruptible power supply system (UPS) with the ability to be mounted into a PC case using a 5 1/4" drive bay. A fully integrated UPS with all the necessary components of a traditional UPS in a single box. Providing convenient, space saving, hassle free, and power protection solution to mission-critical computing environments.

In related news, we retired our venerable 2006-vintage Win32/Core2 Lenovo Thinkpad notebook last night. (We shall still keep it around for emergency backup in case the macbook experiences downtime). The Thinkpad was where we cut our teeth on SSE2 assembly coding, but with 64-bit, AVX and multithreading we are not interested in the extra hassle of producing Windows-capable code. And with my new quad-Sandy-Bridge system doing as much work in 12 hours as the Lenovo does in a week - and this is not even using the AVX capability yet - while drawing insignificantly more power (I base this simply on holding my hand over the box-top vent fan and feeling how warm the exiting air is), we can no longer justify running DC stuff on the latter.

[Xyzzy]

That internal UPS is pretty cool looking, but it looks so small compared to the battery that we have in our smallest UPS.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by sdbardwick

If you have gigabit Ethernet adapters on both ends, you don't need a crossover cable. Auto-crossover is built into the standard. Anyway, if you have a longer (Cat 5 or higher) cable around, give it a try; it will either work or not, but won't hurt anything aside from not working.

That works exactly as you say - very good.

Regarding space-savings UPS designs, we see that the APC 450G/550G models (as well as some of the CyberPower brand units) have a wall-mount-bracket option ... this is still less convenient than a design which plugs directly into a power outlet (like our 6-outlet surge protector does - remove outlet face plate, plug dual 3-prongs of the surge protector into outlet pair, screw long central securing screw into the same threaded hole which the outlet-faceplate setscrew used), but is in the "more like it" direction. We have had a decent hit rate using this set of keywords:

uninterruptible power supply "plugs directly into" wall outlet

However, given that all of the "wall mountable" UPS systems we have found thus far are basically a standard corded UPS with a wall-mount bracket thrown in (and thus require much more work than direct plug-in, and still have the irritating and we-feel-completely-unnecessary cable), we sense that this is becoming a good candidate for the "things that unaccountably don't exist" thread on this forum.

[Xyzzy]

All four boxes are now sold and the raccoons are saved!

[kladner]

Congrats! I am relieved, as I no longer have to battle the new toy lust.

[chappy]

I am part happy and part sad--I was hoping that you wouldn't be able to sell them till after my self-imposed spending freeze was over...

[ewmayer]

We spent a couple hours yesterday installing our spiffy pre-owned Sandy Bridge quad in its final home, a perfect-sized space next to our home office desk. That required us to reroute the Comcast cable sticking out of the wall right in the way of that, but now everything fits great. We had to raise the system off the floor about 3" to avoid having to rip out a piece of wooden molding which made the gap too narrow for the box at floor level. This leaves us with some usable space for excess cabling and such under the unit.

As a result, we no longer require a wall-mount option for our UPS, and thus have added this UPS to our Christmas wish list. This should have enough capacity to allow both a Sandy Bridge and a Haswell quad (which we shall add next next year) to be plugged into it.

And our multi-month project of porting our existing SSE2 FFT-mul code base to AVX begins today. We hope to get 2x the throughput out of our SB box at the other end, and thus to be well-positioned for AVX2 when mainboards with Haswell CPUs become widely available next year.

[henryzz]

2x throughput would be impressive as I believe Prime95 only sped up by something like 1.3x from memory.

[Stargate38]

Why did you sell the 4 computers in the first place?

[Xyzzy]

Electrical costs, both to run them and to cool them.

Plus, we achieved our goal and we learned a lot.

And, after a while, they got a bit boring.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by henryzz

2x throughput would be impressive as I believe Prime95 only sped up by something like 1.3x from memory.

"First light" for the AVX code port today ... based on preliminary timings I get ~1.45x vs SSE2 in single-threaded mode.

This is without taking any special advantage of the 3-register format of AVX arithmetic instructions, is only for a restricted subset of FFT radices, and for the Fermat-mod convolution flavor, which is slightly simpler than Mersenne-mod .. Now just need to AVX-port the remaining ten or so FFT radices, wrestle with the nontrivial indexing used for the Mersenne-mod dyadic squaring step and carry macros, propagate the code changes to the multithreaded versions of the same routines, etc. No problemo, gimme a couple minutes...

BTW, I suspect the reason I get slightly better than the aforementioned 1.3x is that George's SSE2 code is better than mine, meaning he was closer to "hitting the wall" in terms of memory bandwidth already for his SSE2 code. But I'll take it...