I’ve recently taken delivery of a few new goodies to complement the MACCHIATObin Arm v8 powered board that I’ve written about recently on my blog.

• Standing up a IBM Spectrum LSF Community Edition cluster on Arm v8
• Turning up the heat…on my Armada 8040

Youi'll recall that my efforts to do some rudimentary testing including running HPL were thwarted by overheating. So I decided to address the issue with some parts I’ve been meaning to pickup anyway for some other interesting projects I have in the pipeline (fingers crossed):

• 1 x Noctua NF-A14 cooling fan
• 1 x NOFAN P-500A fanless power supply
• 1 x (red) Open benchtable

And this is what is looks like now…

Now, the red workbench and shiny heatsinks scream performance. So what about my run of HPL (Linpack)? Well, I decided to start over from scratch and built my own Linpack against ATLAS, which I also compiled from scratch (let that run overnight).

The result? I went from hitting the thermal limiter (and a non-result) to a successful Linpack run - with the CPU temperature never really going much past 50C. As for my Linpack score, you can see that below.