"Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Your cluster will need a home, and there are good homes and not > so good homes depending on its scale.
A cluster in its home will be somebody's neighbor. It may not be a very nice neighbor. In general you do not want to put a rack's worth of computers in a room which is normally inhabited. Too much noise. WAY too much noise. Did I mention NOISE? There is no inexpensive way to quiet down a rack because to first order sound insulation == heat insulation. It can be quiet, or it can be cool, but it is really hard to do both. Your best bet is to place large numbers of computers in a machine room of some sort. A normal framed wall may be enough to subdue most of the noise for a smallish machine room, so that the rooms on either side can be used for normal tasks. (The low frequencies may still come through, but the resulting dull rumble is not that obtrusive.) The noise could in some cases travel through the ventilation to adjoining rooms. It is easy to test for sound properties during construction - place a radio in the machine room, turn it to pure static, and crank the volume up until it is obnoxious. Then see what it sounds like outside and next door. Also buy some hearing protection ear muffs for use in the machine room. They are much cheaper than hearing aids. Regards, David Mathog [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
