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Anup_Agarwal
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4 years ago

Is the Intel N3000 FPGA PAC compatible with Supermicro SYS-2029GP-TR server.

TLDR: Is the Intel N3000 FPGA PAC compatible with Supermicro SYS-2029GP-TR server. If so, what kind of power connections does it expect from the server. Power ports on the server: According to th...
Anup_Agarwal's avatar
Anup_Agarwal
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
4 years ago

Compatibility:

We set max fan speed through IPMI. Mechanically the NIC fits in the PCIE riser in the rear end of server. The slot is PCIE 3.0 x16.

Power connection:

We contacted Supermicro for this. They suggested us to use cable [1] to connect the PCIE power port on the power distribution board to the 6 pin PCIE power port of the FPGA. We did this. This cable respects the pinout of the N3000-N PAC.

LEDs:

Currently both the activity LEDs (for QSFP A, B) blink in green and both the connectivity LEDs blink yellow (FYI this issue is also raised by us in [2], I am not sure if you want to merge these posts). This is when nothing is connected to the QSFP ports.

Note we have the Intel N3000-N PAC. This does not support 10G configuration and the data sheet never mentions connectivity LED with yellow. Only mentions all 4 leds yellow in case of power/fan issue.

We have tried removing and installing the board again. This did not work. The servers we have are brand new and there is no dust and the edge connectors are clean. We ensure that the fans are at full speed.

We even plugged in the FPGA into a Dell PowerEdge R720 server. We observe the same behavior (2 yellow, 2 green blinking LEDs and board not showing in lspci) on it. Previously the board worked perfectly fine on another Dell PowerEdge R720 server. Based on this we think the board should be getting sufficient power/airflow. Is it possible that the board is damaged in some way? How can we confirm?

fpgainfo bmc just says `No FPGA resources found.`

PCIE Enumeration:

We cannot see the accelerator in `lspci | grep -i accel` or `lspci -d :0b30`. The server is brand new, no dust. We ensured server fans are at full speed through IPMI as well as by inspecting server fan noise.

Other potentially useful information:

Environment:

We are using Centos 7.9 and linux kernel 4.19. We started with Centos 7.6 compiled linux kernel 4.19 with real-time patch following instructions in the user guide. Somewhere in between a `sudo yum update` caused update from Centos 7.6 to 7.9. We then installed the runtime stack for N3000-N.

I would imagine we should still be able to see the board in lspci irrespective of Centos 7.6 or 7.9. Am I wrong here? If so, I can reinstall Centos 7.6 and ensure we don't update to Centos 7.9.

Also, the user guide says:

  • Enable the following options in the BIOS:
    • Intel VT-x (Intel Virtualization Technology for IA-32 and Intel 64 Processors)
    • Intel VT-d (Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O)

we couldn't find these in the BIOS so skipped this step.

dmesg output:

Please find attached the output of dmesg.

Data sheet: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/documentation/dlq1585950463484.html

User guide: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/documentation/zsf1588015530773.html#kdq15984767...

[1] Supermicro CBL-PWEX-0581 8 Pin to Two 6+2 Pin 12V GPU Power Cable, 65 cm

[2] https://community.intel.com/t5/Programmable-Devices/What-do-two-yellow-and-two-green-blinking-LEDs-on-the-Intel/m-p/1319766