On Mon, 20 Mar 2006, Charlie Peck wrote:
I think clusters like the one Eric wants to build have /significant/ educational value, both in the building and the use. How else does one learn to do parallel/distributed programming if not on a cluster, even a "toy" one? Sure the single AMD64 will be more powerful but it won't provide an opportunity to learn about message passing, speedup, efficiency, problem decomposition, etc.
Oh I agree, but I do think it is fair to point out the $1/watt/year problem. That's enough to at least open up the possibility of e.g. a four node AMD64 cluster with modern CPUs, memory, NICs instead with the money you save. It's a trade-off -- a smaller, but much faster cluster doesn't demonstrate scaling over as long a range and so on, but it does MUCH more actual computation per second if there is any chance that he's building a cluster to eventually try to do some real work. But then, clustering is always about trade-offs;-)
There are a couple of issues when ganging multiple power supplies, most having to do with the lines in the ATX standard where the board sends a signal back to the power supply. I believe the site that RGB is referring to is http://joule.bu.edu/~hazen/LinuxCluster. If this isn't enough get in touch, we have worked through these same problems for our portable clusters, see http://cs.earlham.edu/little-fe
Yeah, that looks like it. Kinda cute in its own way. And you don't "have" to buy stock aluminum or steel and cut and bend it into shelf trays for the motherboards, BTW -- there was a design somewhere that mounted the motherboards onto cookie sheets and "racked" them in a standard cookie-sheet rack, or a rack like the ones they use in cafeterias. Slide in, slide out. rgb
charlie
-- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
