[Beowulf] A Cluster of Motherboard.

[H.Vidal, Jr.]

What's remarkable to consuder is that one of the very largest
(if not the largest?) data cluster systems in the world is a bare
motherboard system, strapped together with lots of simple
screws and Velcro.

That's Google, in case you did not know. I was shocked to see
this when I saw a presentation recently by one of the Google
guns here in NYC (actually, the inventor of Froogle).
He showed us pix of a bunch of nodes essentially
sitting on some insulating material, screwed to a simple
frame-style chassis with careful consideration of grounding
and power. His point was to emphasize that google considers
lots of very cheap, very simple nodes key to their growth, and cases
are 'right out' when you go to this scale (he would not share the
exact N of nodes with us, but alluded to something on the order of
100K, at that time, and this is *always* growing).

Really quite fascinating, and so low-tech compared to the attendees'
expectations.

hv

Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Josip Loncaric wrote:
> 
>> A cheap bare case can cost less than $20 -- and can save you a lot of 
>> work, although perhaps not shelf space.  For safety, ease of 
>> installation, and FCC EM reasons, cheap metal cases should be considered.
>