[Beowulf] Re: Beowulf of bare motherboards

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 07:17:54PM -0500, Jean-Christophe Ducom wrote:

> I tried to find a link to a 'old' project where people were using
> racks to put barebone motherboards (to save the cost of the case
> basically).  It was similar to the following project but was more
> elaborated (it was possible to pull out the bare motherboards of the
> shelf, etc...)

> http://www.abo.fi/~physcomp/cluster/celeron.html

I recently bought a bunch of old ECS P4VXMS motherboards cheap on
Ebay, in order to build my own personal home cluster for testing and
experimentation.  I plan to mount them on metal shelves somewhat like
the Celeron cluster shown above.  However, that raises the following
questions:

Normally, motherboards are mounted to the metal case using metal
standoffs, which touch the motherboard ONLY at the designed mounting
holes.  Is this in fact necessary?  Desirable?

Is there any reason the standoffs need to be conductive?

Would it be ok to instead simply screw the motherboard down to a flat
piece of wood or plastic?  Or to wood or plastic strips which touch
all along much of the bottom of the motherboard?

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/