The FreeBSD Foundation received a donation of a blade system from +Hewlett-Packard for use as a third-party software build cluster. +This 20-node HP BladeSystem cluster triples the speed of the build +process for i386 packages.
+ +"With this generous donation from HP, we are able to continuously +produce up-to-date packages from more than 13000 ports of third-party +software available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, at about three +times the rate of the previous hardware cluster," said Kris Kennaway, +member of the FreeBSD Port Management Team.
+ +"This directly benefits the users of FreeBSD through the rapid +availability of new and updated software packages, and through the +increased testing and QA of FreeBSD that the new hardware allows."
+ +"We at HP recognize the important role of FreeBSD in the Internet's +global network infrastructure, and we are happy that the HP +BladeSystem cluster can contribute to the on-going success of the +FreeBSD Foundation," said Mark Potter, vice president of the +Hewlett-Packard BladeSystem division.
+ +"They're just standard i386 systems, architecturally, with a very +nice ssh- and serial-based management server," said Kennaway, who +maintains the FreeBSD Ports cluster.
+ +Kennaway said FreeBSD has a few dozen other machines scattered +around the globe for package builds. A big concentration of sparc +machines hosted by Hiroki Sato in Japan include some large +multiprocessor e4500's (10, 12 and 14 CPUs) that have been extremely +valuable for SMP testing. Also, a couple of machines hosted by ISC, +an amd64 hosted by Scott Long, three i386 machines at Yahoo! Korea, +and sometimes Kennaway's own machines in Canada are used for the +official package builds.
+ +The HP BladeSystem cluster is hosted at the Yahoo! datacenter in +the San Francisco Bay area. In addition to Kennaway, Paul Saab +and Peter Wemm from the FreeBSD project, and John Cagle from HP +helped with blade system setup.
+ +The FreeBSD Project provides an up-to-date and scalable modern operating +system that offers high-performance, security, and advanced networking for +personal workstations, Internet servers, routers, and firewalls. The +FreeBSD packages collection includes popular software like Apache Web +Server, Gnome, KDE, X.org X11 Window System, Python, Mozilla, and over +13,000 software suites. FreeBSD can be found on the Internet at +http://www.FreeBSD.org.
+ +FreeBSD Ports webpage
+http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
+
+FreeBSD Package building logs and errors webpage
+http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/