We are happy to announce the immediate availability of cfarm423, cfarm424, cfarm425, and cfarm426, all of which are aarch64 systems. They are hosted in Tokyo, Japan.

cfarm423 is a Radxa ROCK 5B, running Debian 13 trixie, with upstream u-boot and a custom (64K PAGESIZE) linux build that follows Debian 13's release.

The other 3 systems are virtual machines based on an Ampere Altra Max M128-30 system. Each VM has 64 cores and 64GB of memory and runs a different OS:

cfarm424: Debian 13 trixie
cfarm425: Debian testing-forever (currently this is Debian 13, but it will move to Debian 14 and so on)
cfarm426: Rocky 9

Storage for /home is plenty, all are on NVMe with ZFS's block level compression enabled: 4TB for cfarm423, 3TB each for the 3 VMs cfarm424~426.

This addition to the farm should provide good build times for highly parallel workloads on aarch64, and will provide low latency for users in Asia. Enjoy!

We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of two new RISC-V hosts: cfarm93 running upstream Debian, and cfarm94 running upstream Alpine Linux. Both hosts are StarFive VisionFive 2 boards, which is currently the RISC-V hardware with the best balance of upstream software support and performance. We use a fully upstream version of u-boot as well as a near-upstream Linux kernel: the only addition to the upstream kernel are PCIe patches that are pending upstream integration, so that we can use a NVMe drive on the boards.

The hardware was sponsored by RISC-V International, while NVMe drives and hosting are provided by tetaneutral.net. Many thanks to both organizations for their support.

The farm already provides experimental RISC-V hosts since July 2022: cfarm91 (VisionFive 1) and cfarm92 (HiFive Unmatched). However, they clearly provide much less performance than the new boards, and their hardware is no longer produced. We will keep these old hosts online on a best-effort basis while the hardware is working, but without much expectations (e.g. without OS upgrades).

We are pleased to announce the availability of two new machines, cfarm215 and cfarm216. They run the latest Solaris 11.4 SRU (Support Repository Update). cfarm215 is a kernel zone hosted on a Dell R740 system with an Intel Xeon CPU, while cfarm216 is a LDOM hosted on an Oracle SPARC T8-1 with a SPARC M8 CPU.

Basic development packages are installed from the Solaris support repository. More packages can be installed on request.

Thanks to the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at Bielefeld University in Germany for setting up and hosting these machines. The R740 is a donation from de.NBI Cloud Bielefeld, while the T8-1 is a permanent loan from Oracle Corporation.