Kali is a dual-Xeon workstation built in the summer of 2010. I ordered the main parts in July to take advantage of a 15% cashback deal from Bing and TigerDirect. Unfortunately, the first SR-2 motherboard had a bad DIMM slot, so I got an RMA replacement board in August, and I will hopefully get the case in September. This machine will eventually replace Aparna as my primary PC.
If you've seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom then you've heard of the goddess Kali. The name means "the black one" and can also mean "time." Kali is Shiva's consort in Hinduism. I've resisted using this name for a long time, but I felt it was appropriate for this machine.
I'm currently running Windows Server 2008 R2 for benchmarking and overclocking, but I have a copy of Windows 7 Professional x64 ready to be installed when the hardware is finalized. I'm not sure what I want to do about video cards, but I'll probably either use one of my GTX 295s or get a Fermi card. When this replaces Aparna, I plan to steal the RAID drives and hot-swap bay to give this machine more storage space. Power supplies are also undecided; the Enermax is sufficient for now but if I add multiple GPUs I might steal the dual 750W PSUs from Gauri (which is why I customized the case to allow two PSUs).
The 32nm Xeon chips seem to be good overclockers, and my goal is to hit 4GHz or more without pushing the voltage too high. Some people have complained that the SR-2 is not a great overclocker, but I think that's not entirely true. First, dual CPUs brings some added complexity, and even with my limited overclocking so far, I've seen the board behave in unusual ways, so I think it might take some serious tweaking of various settings to really reach maximum performance. Second, many people seem to be buying the cheapest Xeons they can find but still hoping to hit 4GHz or more, which means pushing BCLK very high given their limited CPU multipliers. The guys buying the high-end Xeons seem to be having much more success when overclocking.
Anyway, I'm currently at 175 BCLK x 22 for 3.85GHz at only 1.3 Vcore. I've read that I shouldn't have to increase the voltage very much to be stable at 4GHz (or 182 BCLK). The temps running F@H are right around 60C. Once I get to spend some more time overclocking, I'll post some detailed BIOS settings.