[Beowulf] Tyan's Beowulf in a box

[Geoff Jacobs]

Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> Yes i had received around those release dates already quite some
> questions whether my software works on this box.
> 
> Tyan is hammering upon their 'direct connect' architecture.
> 
> At home here i've got a stand alone S2881 mainboard, it just has 2 pci-x
> 133Mhz slots.
> 
> It's a pretty good mainboard except that the built in graphics card is
> really too slow nowadays for such a mainboard,
> even though i'm not doing much graphical at it other than now and then a
> 'dir' in a command prompt.
> 
> Having pci-x then is a bad idea.
???
> 
> It would be pretty bad of course if this 'personal supercomputer' is
> just a case with 4 stand alone mainboards without
> any form of connection between the boards.
> 
> Note that if you want to buy a real 8 socket machine, tyan has a
> different alternative that's more capable of delivering 8 sockets.
> It's pretty cheap too.
> 
> It's 2 quad boards that are glued together with interconnects (seems to
> me like htx slots by the way), and it works pretty great
> and is already operational here and there.
> 
> Behaves as 1 big 8 socket machine. Of course latency from each chip to
> the global shared memory is pretty bad as compared to such a S2881 board
> and the cpu's for 8xx are more expensive than the 2xx dual core chips.
> 
> That 8 socket machine gets powered then with in total 1300 watt PSU.
> 
> Back on the typhoon 'personal supercomputer'; using gigabit would be a
> scandal for such a capable box.
> Using 350 watt PSU's is quite risky IMHO if dual cores get put in and
> some i/o happens.
Similar to what gets put in 1U rackmount cases.

> 
> The TDP of those dual cores is already 95 watt and up by now.
> 
> That's 180 watt, excluding the watts the PSU will lose for sure, just
> for the chips. Add to that some 4 SATA drives.
One SATA drive per board.

> Each drive if it's a maxtor will be > 22 watt. Then we already are way
> above 300 watt at least for 1 psu.
200 watt for CPUs and drive, Maybe 50-60 watt for platform, including
mobo, fans, etc. Assume good efficiency from the PS, and it should have
a healthy cushion at 350 watt.

> 
> Then usually the financial companies buying toys like this put in a lot
> of ram, as that what's what they buy a cluster for,
> just the RAM they want to use for usually 1 big memory mapped file.
> 
> That'll eat quite a lot of power too. 350 watt a board is not exactly
> what i'd advice.
> 
> 4 x 350 = 1400 watt, without spreading risks over each power supply.
> 
> What if 1 of those psu's fails?
>From what I understand, the boards and supplies are independent.

> 
> Vincent

<snip>
-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs

Go to the Chinese Restaurant,
Order the Special