Hello All, Thank you for your detailed responses. Following your line of thought, advice and web links, it seems that it is not difficult to build a small cluster to get started. I explored the photos of the various clusters that have been posted and it seems quite straightforward.
It seems I have been siezed by a mad inspiration to do this...The line of thought is t make a 19 inch rack with aluminum plates on which the mother boards are mounted. The plan is first to simply create one using the old computers i have...This can be an experimental one to get going...Thereafter it would make sense to research the right mother boards, cooling and so on... It seems that I am going to take the plunge next week and wire these three computers on a home grown rack... A simple question though...Aluminum plates are used because aluminum is does not conduct electricity. Is this correct? Also for future reference, I saw a reference to dc-dc converters for power supply. Is it possible to use motherboards that do not guzzle electricity and generate a lot of heat and are yet powerful. It seems that not much more is needed that motherboards, CPUs, memory, harddrives and an ethernet card. For a low energy system, has any one explored ultra low energy consuming and heat generating power solutions that maybe use low wattage DC? On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Mark Hahn <h...@mcmaster.ca> wrote: > What is 1u? >> > > rack-mounted hardware is measured in units called "units" ;) > 1U means 1 rack unit: roughly 19" wide and 1.75" high. racks are all > the same width, and rackmount unit consumes some number of units in height. > (rack depth is moderately variable.) (a full rack is generally 42"). > > a 1U server is a basic cluster building block - pretty well suited, > since it's not much taller than a disk, and fits a motherboard pretty > nicely (clearance for dimms if designed properly, a couple optional cards, > passive CPU heatsinks.) > > What is a blade system? >> > > it is a computer design that emphasizes an enclosure and fastening > mechanism > that firmly locks buyers into a particular vendor's high-margin line ;) > > in theory, the idea is to factor a traditional server into separate > components, such as shared power supply, unified management, and often > some semi-integrated network/san infrastructure. one of the main original > selling points was power management: that a blade enclosure would have > fewer, more fully loaded, more efficnet PSUs. and/or more reliable. blades > are often claimed to have superior managability. both of these factors are > very, very arguable, since it's now routine for 1U servers to have nearly > the same PSU efficiency, for instance. and in reality, simple managability > interfaces like IPMI are far better (scalably scriptable) > than a too-smart gui per enclosure, especially if you have 100 > enclosures... > > goes into a good rack in terms of size and matieral (assuming it has to be >> insulated) >> > > ignoring proprietary crap, MB sizes are quite standardized. and since 10 > million random computer shops put them together, they're incredibly > forgiving when it comes to mounting, etc. I'd recommend just glue-gunning > stuff into place, and not worring too much. > > Anyone using clusters for animation on this list? >> > > not much, I think. this list is mainly "using commodity clusters to do > stuff fairly reminiscent of traditional scientific supercomputing". > > animation is, in HPC terms, embarassingly parallel and often quite > IO-intensive. both those are somewhat derogatory. all you need to do > an animation farm is some storage, a network, nodes and probably a > scheduler or at least task queue-er. > -- Best regards, arjuna http://www.brahmaforces.com
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