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clustering/farming hardware

T

timberwolf5480

n00b
Joined
Jan 18, 2006
Messages
13
Anybody got any good ideas on some cheap hardware to start a cluster, I need some specific mobo models that would allow me to boot from a nic. I know most current hardware will, but, am still foggy on say, oh the 650-1000 CPU mhz range for mobos. basicly, I am looking for some ideas on cheap hardware.
 
In the >1ghz range, you're probably best off with dual p3 boards, which are probably my favorite thing ever. eBay will net you a few for >$100 for board and chips. Add another $50 for ram and $50 for a power supply and you've got a naked box. They'll likely have Intel server nics onboard, which I'd strongly expect to have PXE capability. On the other hand, you can get a ~2ghz machine from Walmart (yeah, I know) for $200 and have it in a case, a hard drive, that kind of thing. s754 systems are also getting cheaper by the minute, or a dualcore s939 system can get you a pretty good price/performance ratio.

As to specific systems that have PXE:
anything with the Via Rhine chipset
anything with ICH4/5/6/7
high-end Intel nics
add-on cards (~$15 each)

 
Thanks for the advice guys, I see a certain lot on ebay I might try to bid on, this particualar lot would net me an entire farm all at once, minus the psu and ram. If I don't get it, I'll start looking into buying a mobo/combo here and there. Thanks.
 
unhappy_mage said:
In the >1ghz range, you're probably best off with dual p3 boards, which are probably my favorite thing ever. eBay will net you a few for >$100 for board and chips. Add another $50 for ram and $50 for a power supply and you've got a naked box. They'll likely have Intel server nics onboard, which I'd strongly expect to have PXE capability. On the other hand, you can get a ~2ghz machine from Walmart (yeah, I know) for $200 and have it in a case, a hard drive, that kind of thing. s754 systems are also getting cheaper by the minute, or a dualcore s939 system can get you a pretty good price/performance ratio.

As to specific systems that have PXE:
anything with the Via Rhine chipset
anything with ICH4/5/6/7
high-end Intel nics
add-on cards (~$15 each)

Click to expand...

I'm also looking to build a farm at somepoint this summer or before doing this kind of setup, but I wondered about power consumption? I don't want to run a full time farm only to be greeted with a $200 power bill the next month. Would a setup like this be expensive to run?
 
Well, running a farm isn't cheap. You can reduce power usage by using Seasonic power supplies; they're more efficient than most other power supplies. And using low-heat chips like the Pentium M and mobile Athlons will be more expensive in the short term, but when summer rolls around and you have to air-condition them, it'll save you a bundle.

Funny that you should mention a $200 power bill - that's what ours was when Dad told me to shut down the extras. We had 12 computers going, electric stove, gas everything else. I'm now farming at college, where utilities are included :D

 
Can someone point out an application which would be somewhat useful for a normal geek to run on a cluster?

I so badly want to setup something, it's just I have no clue what program I'd run once done... :)
 
marty9876 said:
a normal geek
Click to expand...
And where might I find one of those? :p

Really, unless you're doing distributed rendering for CGI or something, there's not much to do on a cluster. What, you want to run Office on it or something?

 
unhappy_mage said:
And where might I find one of those? :p

Really, unless you're doing distributed rendering for CGI or something, there's not much to do on a cluster. What, you want to run Office on it or something?

Click to expand...

serious all mighty shitnix lord of all...

wtf can one do with a cluster? Any way to make the mess rip DVD fast or something? I dunno, just something dang it.

I've set thise things up before, get the nodes running then I run into a small problem...no programs to run. It's just a quest of mine, to do anything with a cluster.
 
Well, you could do that, but you'd have to write a lot of the management software yourself. There are good DVD encoders, but there's no software to take a bunch of DVD images and convert them, especially over a cluster. I once encoded a DVD with 10 pass encoding to see what would happen - the answer is, good quality, but it takes about 15 hours.

The problem with clusters is there's too much processing power and not enough stuff to do with it. Other than FAH, there aren't any good uses for lots of processing power. I once calculated 10 billion places of the constant e, took about 17 days (no link 'cause it's 10GB!). And rendered a chessboard at 10000x7500. That one only took 3 days. And once for real laughs, I compressed over 1TB /dev/zero to a gzip file, then bzip2'd that. So in a few kb, you have a recipe for destruction.

See the sig? I really do code for fun. :p

 
unhappy_mage said:
Well, you could do that, but you'd have to write a lot of the management software yourself. There are good DVD encoders, but there's no software to take a bunch of DVD images and convert them, especially over a cluster. I once encoded a DVD with 10 pass encoding to see what would happen - the answer is, good quality, but it takes about 15 hours.

The problem with clusters is there's too much processing power and not enough stuff to do with it. Other than FAH, there aren't any good uses for lots of processing power. I once calculated 10 billion places of the constant e, took about 17 days (no link 'cause it's 10GB!). And rendered a chessboard at 10000x7500. That one only took 3 days. And once for real laughs, I compressed over 1TB /dev/zero to a gzip file, then bzip2'd that.So in a few kb, you have a recipe for destruction.


how tell me... what software...
Click to expand...
 
marty9876 said:
serious all mighty shitnix lord of all...

wtf can one do with a cluster? Any way to make the mess rip DVD fast or something? I dunno, just something dang it.

I've set thise things up before, get the nodes running then I run into a small problem...no programs to run. It's just a quest of mine, to do anything with a cluster.
Click to expand...

DVD Rebuilder is probably one of the best DVD rippers ever. You can specify upto 7 pass CCE encoding that is totally unbelievable. A 7 pass CCE rip on my dual 2.4ghz Xeon w/2gb of RAM takes about 3 days. They have an RBFarm plugin which will allow you to use however many computers you want to assist in the processing. It scales very linear up to about 5 CPUs then network latency and bandwidth become issues. But with 5 fairly newish computers you can 7 pass in about 6-8 hours. With a 7 pass rip, the compressed version is virtually identical to the original. I've never been able to see any artifacts whatsoever at that level of reprocessing.

www.doom9.org for more details.

 
moo said:
me said:
I once calculated 10 billion places of the constant e, took about 17 days (no link 'cause it's 10GB!). And rendered a chessboard at 10000x7500. That one only took 3 days. And once for real laughs, I compressed over 1TB /dev/zero to a gzip file, then bzip2'd that.So in a few kb, you have a recipe for destruction.
Click to expand...

how tell me... what software...
Click to expand...
1) PiFast 4.2, it was the latest at the time.
2) POVRay, best free renderer ever IMO.
3) gzip. dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1k | gzip -9f - > zero.gz yields this file. I don't recommend clicking that link directly; Firefox (at least on my machine) tries to display the file, and it's 1GB. Change count=1M to get a TB. Note, too, that it's 1020K; running it through a second pass is recommended to get it to a reasonable size. And please don't use this to crash someone else's machine, I don't want that.

 
yeah so had to click the link... then while firefox just sat there I had timem to read

unhappy_mage said:
I don't recommend clicking that link directly; Firefox (at least on my machine) tries to display the file, and it's 1GB. Change count=1M to get a TB. Note, too, that it's 1020K; running it through a second pass is recommended to get it to a reasonable size. And please don't use this to crash someone else's machine, I don't want that.

Click to expand...


 
Duster said:
yeah so had to click the link... then while firefox just sat there I had timem to read

Click to expand...

lol, my notebook speakers started poping and the whole nine yards...

no click linky....
 
i don't think lethal would like it

Maybe try the sub forum WLWC and say no clicky

 
Duster said:
i don't think lethal would like it

Maybe try the sub forum WLWC and say no clicky

Click to expand...


U sure?

justnotright4cs.jpg
 
LOL I missed that entire edit about maken her PC crash...

I guess she has not found this thread yet

 
Duster said:
I guess she has not found this thread yet.
Click to expand...
I saw it. And your point? I gave mage 24 hrs off. I think I went way easy on him.
 
As long we are on the subject of what to run on a cluster/farm, I was wondering if anyone could get vmware, or, wine, to run on a diskless setup? I have a sinking feeling that it doesn't. I had planned to build a cluster to help with rendering animations, however, 3dsmax has no linux client that I am aware of(kinda sounds like UD, eh?). Right now, I have my main gaming rig, my old gaming rig, a small server with gentoo linux, running vmware, running ud.....(see where this is going)? And some of the renderings I do, it just isn't enough power to get it rendered without taking my main out of commission to do "just" rendering. I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas to run the 3dsmax renderer, other than switching to blender or maya.



Unhappy_mage, you should be sent to your room without supper, bad kitty, bad kitty!
 
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