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⇱ IBM POWER9 Server IC922 9183-22X

IBM POWER9 Server IC922 9183-22X

How To


Summary

This article is to cover some details and all the places you can get further information on this exciting new server from IBM called the IC922.

Objective

👁 Nigels Banner

Environment

This server is available from IBM. It contains the POWER9 processor and is the latest member of the Power Systems OpenPOWER server range to run Linux workloads.

Steps

Briefly:

Technical details:

  • CPU - 24, 32 or 40 POWER CPU cores with SMT=4 means up to 160 Active concurrent CPU core Threads
  • Memory - 32 DDR4 DIMM slots with 16, 32 or 64 GB DIMMs for a max of 2 TB
  • Storage - SAS and SATA format HDD and SSD with 24 2.5" drives in three front disk bays up to 92 TB internal - NVMe in the next release
  • I/O adapters -10 PCIe adapter slots with a mixture of Gen3 and Gen4 including FC SAN adapters, Mellanox for 100 Gb and regular 1 Gb / 10 Gb networks
  • Acceleration - Up to six NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU adapters - more in a later release
  • Operating System - Red Hat RHEL 7.6 ALT - more operating systems and version are planned

Workloads:

  • Accelerated workloads like Artificial Intelligence, inferencing, and High-Performance Computing (HPC) which make excellent use of the NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs

  • Other general Linux on Power workloads including Storage Serving, Cloud, Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hosting, Big Data, and RDBMS  Check that whatever services or applications that you start or install, are supported by the vendor of that software

Dates:
  • Announcement date: 28 Jan 2020
  • General Availability date: 7 Feb 2020
IC922 on the IBM website:
IC922 Data Sheet:
Announcement Links for various regions and countries:
IBM Redbook
IBM Docs Technical Manuals for IC922:
YouTube Videos:
Power Virtual User Group Webinar covering the IC922:
Webinar Replay + Slides:
Some of the details and pictures covered in this Webinar
Details for the front and inside of the server
The rear of the server, adapters, and connections
The "one pager" of details
Performance Monitoring ready with nmon (on-screen) and njmon
Both open source tools capture all the Linux level OS stats in great detail but also the AC922 & IC922 NVIDIA GPU stats including
  1. GPU MHz
  2. GPU temperature (C)
  3. GPU CPU Utilisation
  4. GPU memory Utilisation
  5. Electrical power consumption (Watts)
For example, in this screen capture (in the following picture), we see njmon live capturing the stats from the London IC922 ESP server (note this one has only two GPUs out of the possible six). The server was running a simple Tensor-Flow test case. The njmon performance tool saves the stats to time-series database InfluxDB and it is graphed by Grafana in a browser - Splunk and Elastic are possible too.
More details and download the code or pre-compiled programs from:
Hands-on Hints and Tips
Some pointers that might save you time
  1. At this first GA1 release in Feb 2020, only Red Hat RHEL 7.6 is supported and you need to get hold of the ppc64le and ALT installation image.
    Look for the DVD image with name: RHEL-ALT-7.6-20181010.0-Server-ppc64le-dvd1.iso
  2. Once ready: plug in the communication cables, plug in the power supply cables and nothing happens.  Then, press the White power-up button on the front right of the unit, firmly but quickly (subsecond). Then, wait 15 to 20 seconds and the server bursts in to life with fans speeding up and boot sequence information on the RS232 console or more likely the VGA screen. You will, in a minute or two, see the Petitboot menu to select your boot device.
  3. Warning: Don't make our simple mistake. Pressed the power-on button firmly for a second or two and release.  We think the server notices the request to boot but as you hold the button down for some time, it then thinks you also want power-off.  So it apparently, does nothing.  The result was we stood, waiting for many minutes wondering "what is going on?"
  4. To install from USB Memory Key also called a thumb dive or flash stick, then two hints:
    1. Burn the image .iso using dd or tool capable of raw copy.  Do not use AMD64 or x86_64 (typically Windows) tools that create a FAT32 file system.
    2. At the boot stage, you need to add the RHEL magic incantation to get it to work. tTo set the USB device as the boot device: At the GRUB boot options, hit 'e' to edit them to add at the end:  
      ​​​​​​​inst.text inst.stage2=hd:UUID=2018-10-10-22-13-55-00
      See IBM Docs: Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM POWER9 servers with a USB device
      Note: that UUID can change in the future.
  5. KVM is not supported. Unofficial simple tests show that the basic KVM functions are working. Use at your own risk in an "unsupported beta test" and "not for production use" mode.
  6. While the server is running, don't remove the lid. The air cooling fans are the only user replaceable hot-plug parts under the lid. If you need to replace a fan, do it quickly and replace the lid. Removing the lid causes no damage but the fans accelerate to a fast speed and are noisy. If you need to add memory, change a POWER9 CPU or add, remove or move adapters, then you need to power-down the server first.

Additional Information

Other places to find content from Nigel Griffiths IBM (retired)

Document Location

Worldwide

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Document Information

Modified date:
31 December 2023

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