[Beowulf] Re: Beowulf of bare motherboards

[Glen Gardner]

That is a really nice project. Good work!

Glen


Florent Calvayrac wrote:

> Jack Wathey wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Andrew Piskorski wrote:
>>
>>>> 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?
>>>
>
>
> Inspired by the discussions on this list, we built in March 2003
> a Beowulf of bare motherboards. You can see it (with text in French) at
>
>
> http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sitepatrick/Station/index.html
>
>
> Everything is made of metal, using ready-made beams to which we attached
> the motherboards with integrated Broadcom NICs. The cluster (diskless, 
> headless) has been running
> fine since then. We have one power supply per node in order
> to maximize cooling : design was made with CATIA V5R6, calculations 
> were done by graduate students
> in engineering using Flo Therm, and they predicted the temperature
> inside the cluster within 1 degree C : 27 degrees at steady state
> for 19 ambient.
>
> The only detail we had forgotten was to make buttons for power and 
> reset, since they are only to be found in ready-made cases ; we lost
> hours to find the proper socket size on Radiospares.
>
> The design took about 20 hours, the fabrication about one week,
> software installation (having to find the proper driver for the NICs 
> for clustermatic, setting up PXE) two days,  we saved maybe 30 %  of 
> the total cost (here about 4000 euros for 8 Athlon 2400 nodes with 1 
> Gb RAM), had a lot of fun and learning.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Glen E. Gardner, Jr.
AA8C
AMSAT MEMBER 10593
Glen.Gardner at verizon.net


http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze24qhw/index.html