Dashcat2 Build

My KVM extenders arrived today and I have console access from the living room of my house now. I took a few photos I'll post en-masse later. For now, it's been a long day and I need my rest so I can install a hard drive in the server tomorrow and put Linux on it.

The Intellistation A Pro front end has had Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop AMD64 installed on it and I was able to install Blender 2.53 Beta on it and complete the Sintel test render, although I still don't know why the sky looks overcast in the render, but it does under both Windows and Linux so at least it's consistent. The Durian guys said it would only render right under a particular build of the 2.5 Alpha anyway so no biggie.

I've discovered that Windows XP is a clusterf--k on my cluster. I said in the video I had been abusive about shutdowns. Yeah. After all was said and done, I had a total of one node out of the previous Dashcat eight that still had a viable XP install on it that wouldn't go into a BSOD, reboot loop or tard-coma after tripping GFCIs (they hate computers on extension cords) and such. I'm not entirely sold on using XP at all for this cluster, even though primary OS was always meant to be Linux (64-bit, free, faster for this) since the only thing Windows would be used for on these nodes is UDK Swarm, which I haven't even needed yet. I may just stick the XP CoAs on excess computers and sell them off to fund a RAM upgrade.

For now, sleep. Tomorrow is another day and this project is drawing to a close on the hardware side of things.
 
Console pics

effective packaging
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Let's do this like the gadget blogs with a straight unboxing:
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From another angle:
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Let's just get this open here (with my nice knife):
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Nice padding inside, too:
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Real men don't need instructions (okay, so I cheated and read the PDF online):
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Transmitter with the proper ports on one end and the cables at the other the way it should always be:
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Receiver with the cables on the back and the left side:
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Ah, the adapter for the receiver side:
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Good. Switch-mode ethical wallwart. The old kind can DIAF:
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Receiver in position at my messy workstation during Ubuntu install (the one where I forgot to put a hard disk in the server):
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Transmitter in position on top of my switch:
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Dashcat2 as it sits right now:
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Now it's cleanup time. Here are the "before" photos.

My messy workstation. See how much of this crap you can recognize:
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Both messy workstations. Utter chaos:
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And with that, I can conduct the rest of the operation indoors if I have to:
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There was more adventure during the weekend than just the consoles. I haven't given an off-topic lol for your entertainment in a bit so here goes.

My daughter decided she was going to take care of her hair getting in her face. I don't know where she found scissors:
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At least she didn't run with the scissors she found:
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Even more entertaining, later that night as I was gathering laundry, I notice the bed looking a little crooked. Oh crap. The center supports across the king-size span had folded over on themselves. How long this had been the case was unknown. A little rise over run and inverse sine plugged into the calculator and it was found that my wife and I had been sleeping at a 4 degree angle.

It might not have been a problem under normal conditions with a normal steel and foam mattress, but we invested in one of those adjustable air type beds and I converted my side to use water tubes. The tubes were rolling toward the middle of the bed and making the air pressure on her side really tricky to adjust while leaving me with almost no support. No wonder I was tired so often.

I don't screw around when it comes to repairs like this so I moved the heavy-ass water tubes out so I could lift the bed and replaced the plastic crappy feet with standard bricks. Perfect level and perfect sleep since. And I'm going to need it.
 
It is a good day today. I just picked up the exact model of swamp cooler I wanted for my shop at a price of $12 from the local Deseret Industries (second-hand store run by the LDS church). I was prepared to drop $100 on such a cooler in used form so this came as a pleasant surprise. I will have to replace the cooler pad and the tubing between the pump and distribution fork.

Phoenix Manufacturing. Same brand as the cooler I have for my house. They were bought out a while back and new parts are still available for this model.
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Pretty simple design. Very effective.
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Motor needs some cleaning. The cooler was on when I shot this photo. Fast shutter.
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Ah, Utah hard water scale. Someone was missing their bleed-off tee or just didn't run the drain hose for it.
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Hard to see, but the Kill-a-Watt says 157W right there. It's on low speed vent mode with the pump turned off here. This promises to be far more efficient than the A/C unit ever was. I don't believe I'll be needing the high speed mod for a 120 square foot workshop since the
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I just finished rebuilding the water pump in the cooler. The scale that was all over the inside of the cooler was due to abuse in that there was no bleed-off tee in the tubing between the pump outflow and top distributor. Bleeders keep the mineral content of the water low by ensuring the water in the cooler doesn't entirely stagnate, otherwise your cooler becomes the Great Salt Lake.

I bought what I intended to be a replacement for the stock cooler, but thought better of it after realizing the new cooler would only pull water down to a depth of 3/4" while the stock cooler is good to 1/4". A new stock cooler was going to cost me $169 while the one I bought was $15. I was better off repairing the stock pump.

I tried vinegar, then barkeeper's friend and finally CLR to get rid of the buildup in the cooler housing. CLR worked well enough, but required several applications.

The pad that came with the cooler was the blue plastic variety, but I didn't know this until I dug it out because the buildup was so bad it looked like a cardboard pad. That, and it was almost completely rigid while the blue plastic is quite flexible when clean.

I replaced the pad with a double-up combo of an aspen pad in front and blue plastic pad just behind that. This cooler might not need that kind of configuration, really.

I have the cooler running right now for burn-in and I'm getting 68.1F output. I can already tell I need to restrict the pump flow a bit since it's a really aggressive pump for such a small cooler.
 
I just found out that my father-in-law has leukemia, according to blood work done over time and an in-depth analysis I don't quite understand. He has to get some different tests run on bone marrow and such to figure out what kind, but he's been flagged as having the "best" kind of leukemia with the best cure rate and it was caught early.

There's a problem, though. If he needs a bone marrow transplant, it's going to be pretty hard to come by since you need a compatible blood type as well as tissue type match. He's got O-negative blood so that makes this pretty difficult right out of the gate since it's so rare while being sought-after as donor blood since anyone can receive O-negative blood.

My father-in-law is really the only Dad figure I've ever had so I'm trying to do my part here. He has already received his annointed blessings from his sons and he's got prayers all around so that's covered. I'm more direct than prayer for the same reason EMTs carry crash kits instead of prayer beads. I can't directly assist with the marrow thing since I've got A-Positive blood and protein folding won't help this, but I can light up the Internet in a few small spots.

If you have O-negative type blood, please at least consider joining the marrow registry. It's not free and the medicine they treat you with to allow marrow stem cells to be pulled from your arm like a blood donation instead of drilled from your pelvis leave you aching, but you're a superhero for doing it:

http://www.marrow.org/
 
The results from the new tests came back. My father-in-law has CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia). The next round of tests involves checking his lymph nodes and looking for the ZAP-70 marker.

Basically, if ZAP-70 (which belongs in your T-cells) shows up in his B cells, it means he's got five years. If it doesn't show up, he's got 25+.

I've joined the [H]orde. I'm folding on my 5870 right now. I so wish the OpenCL client was out. In any case, my GPU is faster than Dashcat for this.
 
I've taken apart the Amcor AC unit and I found it has a circuit board that carries unique features. Basically, I can hack my swamp cooler to use it if I connect the water pump to the compressor relay and hook the blower to the relays for the AC unit blower. It will switch between low and high speeds natively and will even use the condensation pump circuit to run a purge pump for mineral reduction if I have a pressurized water feedline or to run a water feed pump if I go with a water barrel tank solution.

The condensation pump from the AC unit has the unusual feature of being a low volume, high pressure pump. It was made to spray the condensation water out as a mist. At zero pressure, it will only move about 200mL per minute with 25W consumption. I don't need the high pressure feature so I'll be looking for a pump that will throw water six feet vertically into the basin of the cooler.
 
I've just finished ordering a new case for the Dashcat2 server. This one is a Chenbro model with eight hot-swap SATA bays, a redundant 500W Emacs PSU, spaces for slim FDD and optical drives, an internal space for the boot hard disk and a nice design. I scored four spare drive trays, too.

The redundant power system will be helpful. Since I have two power rails running to my shop and kept losing one off and on last winter, the server will be protected from that problem this trip.

I've ordered a pair of Lenovo Ultranav keyboards for my remote consoles. They're small enough I can hang them out of the way when I'm not poking around with the cluster.

I also got a Logitech DiNovo Edge Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo for my HTPC so I can now use that machine properly while I'm doing my workouts on the exercise bike. I tried a few solutions and none kept a reliable connection for the ten feet I needed. Bluetooth is made for it. When that combo arrives, I can start posting eBay listings or playing games while getting my workout in.

My neighbors across the street sold their house and moved away. The new owners are moving the house out of the park. There's a shed much like my own that will be left behind. I'm going to see if I can buy it to add next to my shop. Dashcat2 might get new digs, freeing up space in my shop and isolating me from the noise and heat of the computers. I'm torn. It's either the computers go in there or wood and metalworking gear does.
 
RAID card arrived from Texas today. This calls for a bit of celebration. Delicious.

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RAID card had a 5VDC rail capacitor sheared off of it at the connector. Has to be sent back.

Chenbro server case arrived yesterday. I'd have taken pictures at the time, but my 13-second grocery-getter left my wife stranded at the supermarket when the fuel filter clogged up. And she was only driving that because I did some really deep surgery on her car over the long weekend and had to make sure it wasn't going to leave her stranded. Oh the irony.

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Now some car work photos:

The only real symptom for this issue was a clogged catalytic converter. When that happens, you have to find out what caused it or it will just happen again.

Oily residue from the exhaust sucked into the upper intake via the EGR system, settling in the lower intake manifold. The dark area near the center is a puddle obscuring a bolt.
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Wide open. One side of the ailing plastic lower intake manifold gasket is shown at the bottom of the photo. The small openings are for coolant. They should be square, but one is pinched inward at the middle of each side. That's where the leak was. After 120,000 miles, I expected something big and this is actually quite minor. The brown sludge in the coolant passages is the nature of the orange Dexcool coolant. Air and heat cause that. I'm switching to green coolant. I don't care if I have to drain it every two years.

That thing in the middle is the balance shaft. 90 degree V6 means odd-fire and that shaft keeps the engine from vibrating... at the expense of about 15HP. Some people get the crankshaft 50% balanced and ditch the shaft to free up the power. Still vibrates after that, but not as badly.
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Valve cover gaskets were being eaten away by the coolant mixed with oil. Changed the gaskets to stop the problem before it started. Re-torqued the rocker arm bolts, too. One was loose.
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The LIM Gasket is in four pieces with gasket goop at the corners.
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New gasket is complete. The old plastic design was replaced with Aluminum and two kinds of rubber.
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LIM re-attached. Don't immediately torque the bolts in one trip. Make six or more rounds in the same in-to-out zigzag-star pattern to let the gasket settle.
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Upper Intake Manifold - Before (notice the tube in the middle. Should be white.)
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Upper Intake Manifold - After
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Throttle Body - Before (Toward the bottom, there was another coolant leak brewing.)
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Throttle Body - After
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All done. Now I just need to get the catalytic converter changed out.
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Damn, nice work on the car. I don't think I would have the balls to do all of that work. I am just happy enough with my HID retrofit (no stupid HID kit throwing light everwhere) and being able to adjust my own valves.
 
Thank you all.

I'm still waiting on a RAID card since I was allowed to make a repair attempt on the card and spaced off the warranty cutoff date. The PPC XOR processor on the card received the wrong voltage due to components that were sheared off on the back side so it's shorted and the card is garbage.

Please pull no punches with returns if you buy altechco products on eBay. They're a metals recycler pulling the Tommy Boy "guaranteed piece of shit" act. I was a fool to give them the benefit of the doubt. I knew that the moment the Power PC chip on the RAID board scalded my thumb and I should have given the back of the board the microscope treatment like I did the front of the board, promptly shipping it back afterward. Scraped solder masking with exposed traces, sheared components, and even one with lifted component pads. I'd fire myself for selling something in that kind of shape.

The boards were pulled working and thrown in a pile on top of each other.

I'm happy to take one for the team, though.
 
My project may be evolving a bit further this week. Before the week is out, I'm supposed to hear back from the people who bought the trailer across the street from me whether or not they are going to take the shed that came with the house. I have first dibs on it at a price of $300 cash, which is pretty good since it's built pretty much the same as my workshop.

Why is this such a pivotal and significant thing? Because, if I can get it, I'll be using it to house both render farms and will be able to up my game in terms of the installation. How so?

Ductless heatpump system for the main workshop
swamp cooler for the server barn
Standby generator
fiberglass insulation from workshop insulates server barn
Polyisocyanurate foam replaces fiberglass in the workshop
Halon fire suppression system for servers
IP CCTV cameras

And that's just the stuff I can scrape together in a year's time without spending anything more than beer money.

My shipping supplies, tools and most computer parts will go in the server barn, clearing space for other projects. Of course, I'll still keep my 12x20 storage bay. It's looking more and more like that thing will become a mini warehouse anyway.

BTW - I still don't have a working RAID card.
 
UPDATE: The shed is mine. And now I have to figure out how to get it the hell over to my lot before Tuesday night to clear the area for the house to be towed out. This is going to be an adventure. And that's putting it mildly.
 
Further Update: The original plan for moving the shed has turned out to be a bag of fail so I used my recipro saw to cut the paneling up to meet the frame and will be using the PVC pipe roller method I've seen on YouTube. I don't know how easy this method will make it to spin the shed the required 180 degrees, but it will be done.
 
Three-point turn with a 1400 pound shed took care of the spin. It's now in my yard, sitting on five 3" Sch40 PVC conduit pipes, pending creation of a gravel foundation for it to sit on. Glad that's over.
 
MisterDNA said:
Three-point turn with a 1400 pound shed took care of the spin. It's now in my yard, sitting on five 3" Sch40 PVC conduit pipes, pending creation of a gravel foundation for it to sit on. Glad that's over.
Click to expand...

Pics, or it didn't happen!! ;)
 
Hallis said:
Pics, or it didn't happen!! ;)
Click to expand...

My wife took one photo during the move. We were more concerned with completing the move before nightfall than grabbing photos since it had already taken so long with no results. Everything else is before and after type shots.

I just finished clearing the weeds and webs out yesterday. Now I need to figure out how to get the two new 3/4" OSB sheets in for the floor reinforcement.

I wanted to find out when the shed was made and found a date code on one sheet of plywood with a March 1997 DOM. I figure it was probably in the summer of 1997 that it was built. It has certainly held up well for being a teenager.
 
New working 12-port RAID card for server is in Salt Lake City now according to USPS. Should arrive today. Permanent riser card for Chenbro case is coming from back East.

Since I have a lot of building materials to worry about transporting, life is also about to get a lot easier. My father-in-law bought a new truck and is selling his old one to my wife and I. It's a 1991 Toyota 4x4 with a new engine and brand new tires. It will be the first non-beater import I've ever owned, preceded by a 1985 Civic hatchback I flogged to death in winter 2003-2004 after nuking the transmission of my Camaro.

I mention the truck because I'm not brave enough to transport the necessary wood and metal for the sheds in my Grand Prix or the Neon. Let alone gravel, actually. And I will need two truckloads of that.
 
I received the new RAID card yesterday. This one works. The riser has been shipped from Virginia and might arrive tomorrow, actually.
 
I stayed up til Midnight installing and initializing the RAID 1 array in the server. I only have a pair of the infamous 1.5TB Seagates in it at the moment. The other six slots will be equipped with larger drives in a 5 disk RAID 5 with a hot spare. I'd like to have an 8TB RAID 5 array in addition to my mirrored array.

Using the internal disk benchmark that came with Ubuntu 10.04, I was able to score an average speed of 95MB/s. During initialization, the array was still providing speeds of 35MB/s. I recall my old RAID-5 back in 2005 would chug at 4-6MB/s when initializing or rebuilding.

I'm reluctant to call the job "Done", but it certainly matches my original idea of "done" once I've installed the machine in the rack, now that the server has the RAID hardware and an NEC USB 2.0 card that would only work in the top slot of the riser (nor would anything else, for that matter, because it insists on running everything at 133MHz like the RAID card.)
 
Dirty shed.
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Far away, but not too far.
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On my lot, still on the conduit rollers.
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Clean. Almost ready for floor reinforcement.
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RAID card and riser in place
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95MB/s on a RAID 1 isn't bad at all.
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Battery backup for everything but the compute nodes. The server is mission-critical. The compute nodes aren't yet.
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PedroDaGr8 said:
Lookin good! Damn it must be nice to have all of that power.
Click to expand...

Thanks. As for the power, I can't really use it yet. It's weird. I feel as though I've grown more as a person in the past year with this project than in the five years prior to it. It's like a burden in the sense that a soldier's field pack is a burden. It's a lot to deal with and wears you out, but you become stronger because you have to carry it.

I could probably write a book about this whole thing, actually. I might, actually, since there are surely others who'd like to jump into this kind of thing. But I'm not even done with the whole thing, yet. The supercomputer was just one piece of the puzzle.

At Nekochan.net, one member has this in his signature: "Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day". This is true.

There's a theory some guy had where if you spent 10,000 hours on any particular thing, you'd become a master at it. I don't know if I fully believe that, but I'm certainly willing to put it to the test. The problem with putting any kind of solid figure on it is this project branches out a lot, to say the least. I've had to become an architect, businessman, marketer, carpenter, electrician, auto mechanic, landscaper, building mover and learn new styles of kung fu I never thought I'd need within the field of computers.

And here's the funny thing: I'm still doing it all because I want to make my game. What started out as a plan to get my name and my story out to the world so I'd have a good shot at meeting my soulmate has evolved into something so much deeper. Soulmates are more like vertices than parallels. True soulmates are impossible to find. But you can find yourself.
 
wow man, im very impressed, and you ride! albeit backcountry by the intensely directional board, but to each his own, if I lived in utah instead of tahoe id probably get in on some natural terrain, chairlifts are just hard to beat though
 
cj3waker said:
wow man, im very impressed, and you ride! albeit backcountry by the intensely directional board, but to each his own, if I lived in utah instead of tahoe id probably get in on some natural terrain, chairlifts are just hard to beat though
Click to expand...

The snowboard? It's a decoration. Fifty of them were made a promotional giveaways for the 2003 PS2 game Kya: Dark Lineage (you ride a board in the game, just not on snow). I bought a copy of the game second-hand in 2005 and loved it. Imagine Little Red Riding Hood beating the everloving shit out of wolves (their teeth fly out, you can throw them into grinders, kick them in the nuts, fall on them, etc). The game was panned by some critics for being too much like Jak and Daxter (which I've still never played). Any girl in a game who'd rather administer brutal poundings than cower in fear is pretty cool in my book. The sickening look on a wolf's face as he staggers in pain after you meet his nuts with your foot is possibly the best part of the game from a juvenile humor standpoint.

I missed out on a snowboard like the one on my wall by mere seconds like three weeks after I bought the game. It became my mission to acquire one. Actually, I have two now. One to display and one to save. I'm still looking for one with the second design. I have two with Kya on them, but haven't even seen one available with the Brazul (Kya's possessed alien Dad; main antagonist) character print.
 
Can we know more about the game and how this cluster incorporates into that?

This going to be used for prerendered cut scenes?
 
LibertySyclone said:
Can we know more about the game and how this cluster incorporates into that?

This going to be used for prerendered cut scenes?
Click to expand...

Pre-rendered cutscenes, yes. Mainly, it's a really big digital playground for the same reason developer consoles have more RAM, faster interfaces and/or different interfaces as compared to end-user consoles. Sure, it costs me $.30 an hour to run it at full bore, but that's the price I pay.

As for the game, I don't want to reveal very much because the game is really little more than a labor of love when compared to what it's sitting on top of. It would have required a full-on supercomputer to run it at all when I laid out the basics after a fever dream in 1997. Even with Moore's Law and all that taken into consideration, it looked like 2030 would be when the capabilities would be available at Walmart or Best Buy, even if you were willing to install an extra card or two.

I played with a Voodoo Rush in 1998 and saw a glimmer of hope. Then, 3D accelerators went mainstream, evolving into GPUs. Soon, GPU computing popped up out of nowhere and proved itself with protein folding and physics processing.

In 1997, I had a 15" CRT monitor that gave me XGA resolution for the first time. I got a 19" Trinitron CRT with SXGA capability in 2000. In 2004, I paid $800 for a Dell 2001FP, thinking it was all I'd ever need. Widescreen hit with 1920x1080/1200 as the standard by which all others were to be judged at the time. Then came WQXGA. 4 megapixels in one panel... Then Eyefinity with a whopping 7680x1600 pixels starting to show up among the elite gamers.

As of 2005, my fever dream was still held back by the lethargic speeds of magnetic storage media--both transfer rate and access time. Gigabyte's iRAM had more effect on me than GPUs did, actually, despite the 4GB limit. Now, SSDs are going mainstream.

In 1997, I thought I was hot shit for having 32MB RAM in one of my systems, even if it was only a 486. The idea of 128MB made me drool. Each node in my cluster has 28 times that much RAM. And those nodes are from 2004. I saw 12GB for $200 in Hotdeals here a bit ago and that was in 4GB sticks.

In 1997, digital cameras were a novelty and would capture a VGA shot for $1000. Maybe you could get 320x240 for three hundred bucks. Prior to that, you had the Canon Xapshot that wasn't even digital. In 1999, I bought a megapixel Kodak for $200. They're an impulse buy today and 3D is almost mainstream. How long until you can go to a game store at the mall, step into a photo booth and have yourself scanned, head to toe, as your own 3D model? Gimmicky as hell, but when it's cheap enough it will happen, just like the photo booths that "sketch" you. Even for the ugly, the technology is there to make an in-game avatar that looks like a hot "you".

In 1997, your standard game music came from a CD in your only optical drive or from MIDI (wavetable, if you were lucky). MP3 changed the game a bit, but compression still sucked and the recording industry's resistance to the blatantly obvious paradigm shift didn't help any, either. You can fit 12.9 hours of uncompressed CD-quality music on a $10 USB flash drive right now. That's a game worth of music, easy.

Autotune proved that even the most gravelly old shrew could be made to sing like an angel. The weather forecast computer voice no longer sounds like Stephen Hawking, having just entered the uncanny valley.

2030? No. 2015 for enthusiasts and 2020 for entry-level. I'll be 35, not 50. I have a fire under my ass to be ready for it. There's a lot of ground to cover in the next five years, though, and I'm counting on a horse named OpenCL unless another open standard blows it out of the water. Nvidia makes a good GPU, but CUDA is too vendor-locked. It's like GLide: Reloaded, for those who remember the 3dfx API.

Maybe I'm being too vague here? I've only talked about the technologies that have gone from cutting-edge expensive to Walmart blister-pack cheap.

Garry's Mod is a really good example of a proper playground. Before Machinima, I had never seen a hovering cat kill people with exploding watermelons. Hollywood is out of ideas. They have to play it safe with cookiecutter films to have (even a shot at) a chance in hell of recovering the millions upon millions of dollars spent making said films.

DasBoSchitt, JSclan, and, my personal favorite, Ross Scott (Freeman's Mind and Civil Protection) made some of the most entertaining videos I've seen lately and they cost less per minute to make than even that shitpile Plan 9 From Outer Space did. The Machinima types didn't have to play it safe because the software was cheap and time is something most of us have anyway. Not everybody likes Freeman's Mind or Civil Protection. Not everybody likes Beavis and Butt-head either.

My idea is to create a digital playground that just makes sense and have my own game full of really bizarre shit packed with it to get the gears turning.

For a mental exercise, imagine, if you will, the story of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake for being a heretic. Badass hottie killed for no reason. It was a tragedy. What if you were mounting a rescue attempt with modern technology on your side? Hellfire missile vs Catapult. Iron-tipped crossbow bolt vs ceramic body armor. Mini-gun vs medieval soldier, F/A-22 blasting over Rouen at Mach 2 and scaring the everloving shit out of, well, the type of people who thought Joan was a heretic in the first place. It's the kind of thing fan-fiction is made of and it's this kind of thing that gives people a reason to be creative and the means to do it.

And if you aren't kept down by barriers like $5000 3D packages and $500 audio, video or image editing suites, or vendor-locked APIs, time is really all you have to worry about. The proper software is already available for free via open source software. Most of that will run on the three major OS groups.
 
Forget the rack... I would love to wake up to those mountains everyday.....
 
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