Patrick

HP / HPE Moonshot Unofficial Reference Guide

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WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
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New York, NY
A spare EL4000 has arrived, so I threw a single M510 (same config as the last message, but without the extra NIC) and a 500W power supply (not technically supported, but seems to work) into it to compare. It draws around 28W with the node powered off, or slightly more than the EL1000 did. It draws 60W during POST and 52W sitting idle in the Ubuntu installer.

I might move the node from the EL1000 into the EL4000 later today, just to see what that gives me for numbers. Probably ~85W or so total, or a bit higher if I throw CX3s into the EL4000 as well.

So 120W with 4 nodes isn't unreasonable.
How's that EL1000? Quiet/not too space consuming? Thinking of a new machine to replace the t740, looks like they can use the m750 blades with Xeon-E2000 series Coffee lake chips.
 

Camprr23

Member
Nov 20, 2019
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Possibly a really stupid question, but has anyone got a pinout for the edge connector of the modules? They look like some kind of extended PCIe connector. The idea would be to run the modules outside of the chassis. So power and network would be the minimum.
 

Kahooli

Member
Dec 3, 2022
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Thread necro... I got a EL1000 off ebay not realizing that the blades arent included. I am also hitting the same wall found in this thread - m510 can be found for affordable prices, but non have heatsinks! the HPE site says only m510, m710x and m750 are compatible with the chassis... but it looks like the moonshot 1500 can support lots of modules... so perhaps the EL1000 will let me run an M710p without complaining?
I only took a chance on this thing because it was cheap and had PXIE slots for some NI cards I want to tinker with without buying a dedicated PXIE chassis. Anyone know the cross compatibility of the cards?
 

RZSN

New Member
Mar 4, 2023
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Has anybody started reversing the pinout of the Moonshot edge connector, or is it described somewhere? I would like to make a "micro-moon" single node appliance - for router / NAS / home server use, and them something like a smaller cluster of 3-4 nodes, targetting HA setups.
 

Camprr23

Member
Nov 20, 2019
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Yes, I have seen a module working 'standalone', but the person working on this blew up his module (short circuit on pins) and has stopped his efforts. I have a moonshot backplane, a complete moonshot and a single-slot EL1000 motherboard (homelab, so available for experimentation), and could reverse-engineer the pins (started the effort, I have a bookstack running to capture the information.). Currently, I am just lacking the time.
One of the problems we faced is that the slot is not a PCIe slot, but it's much thicker. The only way we found to get slots is to de-solder them from moonshot motherboards.
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RZSN

New Member
Mar 4, 2023
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Nice, I was not aware of EL1000, probably the easiest path would be to get me one as well. I have a collection of various Moonshot CPU modules, not all are listed as compatible though with el1000. Previously I have managed to power up one, and there was a bios on serial port (pin header on board), and also booted it somehow on blind with that.

Last addition is m710 - which has a very weird memory design, having ECC chips on board, while slots required non-ECC modules. Looking at the parts, there are two channels, each having set of four SKhynix H5TC4G83AFR packages - this is 4G in x8 package, so likely the four of them are meant to complement two 2Rx8 DDR3L modules. Given that there is 1GB of ECC per module onboard, its meant to be an 8GiB 2Rx8 DDR3L.

m710 Question 1: does memory brand/model matter (do I need a specific sodimm, or any that has the matching organization would do?)

m710 Question 2: is the only option a 2ch 2DPC population, that is 32GiB, or would the cpu board boot with different memory? (1ch 2DPC would obviously work for 16GiB), but what about 1DPC or 4GB sodimms?

@Camprr23 - I have some notes on paper, usually use offline doc/pdf for my private work, or gdoc for shared ones. Would you be up to some occasional calls to sync up and share or cross-check stuff?