Need ball park power and cooling requirements

[Ben Ransom]

At 04:01 PM 9/30/02 -0600, Dean Johnson wrote:
>On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 15:17, Timothy H. Keitt wrote:
> > I'm setting up lab space and plan to build a small (8-16 node) cluster
> > of dual Xeon nodes (Dell 2650 or equivalent). I need to give the
> > engineers the power and cooling needed in the 6'x8' server room that
> > will house the cluster. Any rules-of-thumb for what's required? Thanks.
> >
>
>A good ballpark, with decent margins, would be 300w per box. You need to
>add things like monitors and switches too.
>
>         -Dean

I'd add a little more margin.  I'm using dual athlons, which may be more 
power thirsty than Xeons -- dunno. Nonetheless, planning on just the power 
supply rating per box could be limiting.  Our cluster sometimes goes over 
calculated amp (and power) ratings when all cpus are crunching 100%.  We 
have Baytech power strips rated at 20 amps which should have handled 7 dual 
athlon boxes apiece, if going by the spec numbers.  We had to add another 
power strip and spread out to only 5 boxes each.  Fortunately, I had enf 20 
amp circuits in the room (4 for a 20 node cluster + eth switch + head node).


-Ben Ransom
  Programmer/ Systems Administrator
  Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineering, UC Davis
  (530) 752-1834  Fax: 752-4158