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Farm project

N

nerk01

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
187
So I got ahold of a premade plexi case designed for lottery tickets. I've measured the 4 trays at 10.5"x8.25" I've been browsing thru Newegg's list of matx boards looking for ones that will fit and work as a diskless farm. Just like to get any of your thoughts on these boards.

MSI KM3M-V $42
MSI KM4M-V $49
DFI KM400-MLV $47
SOYO K7VME $43
BIOSTAR M7VIG 400 $43
SHUTTLE MK40VN $39

Things to keep in mind: CPU's will be from 1900+ up to 2400+ and only running one stick of 128MB

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?
 
More ram. Even without big packets, some gromacs WU's can use up 40MB or so. And unless the client machines each have a small HDD to swap to runningh out of ram will corrupt the WU. If you're using a linux OS to boot them up in text mode via PXE, you have to count a good chunk as used for your ramdisk and another big chunk for folding. The minimum ram I'd recommend is 256MB. If possible do 384 or 512MB since you could then get the PPW boost of setting them all to do BP gromacs work units.

I'd avoid the km400's. I never could get the v6105 (rhine 3) NIC to work in Linux. Might want to juist get a single motherboard at first to test if your LTSP server can get it booted. Easier to RMA 1 than 4.
 
Oh and there's this- http://overclockix.octeams.com

Its a knoppix-based folding LTSP server solution. You install it to HDD and its got all you need to get LTSP booted cleints up in a few minutes. You need bitorrent to d/l the iso.

Or if you want to do it all yourself, here's a bunch of smaple themes for superkaramba. There's a folding monitor theme worked into several of them which is very useful for monitoring the progress on a Linux-based folding farm. http://overclockix.octeams.com/karamba.tgz

Pic of the folding monitor in action at the bottom right.
yoper5.jpg
 
Arkaine23 said:
Oh and there's this- http://overclockix.octeams.com

Its a knoppix-based folding LTSP server solution. You install it to HDD and its got all you need to get LTSP booted cleints up in a few minutes. You need bitorrent to d/l the iso.

Or if you want to do it all yourself, here's a bunch of smaple themes for superkaramba. There's a folding monitor theme worked into several of them which is very useful for monitoring the progress on a Linux-based folding farm. http://overclockix.octeams.com/karamba.tgz

Pic of the folding monitor in action at the bottom right.
yoper5.jpg
Click to expand...

Forgive me, but is LTSP like a cluster environment, or it something else, i had just downloded the overclockix-LTSP yesterday and have not had time to install yet, thats going to be tonights project. Im googling it now, but my connection sucks here at school right now, ill be home later to do more research
 
LTSP = Linux Terminal Server Project

Terminal Services is a method of running diskless clients by serving them an OS from a network server. They boot via LAN (PXE-boot) and download their OS image into a ramdisk. Thus no HDD is needed for these "dummy terminals".

Overclockix LTSP features the following for folding@home specifically-

1) Easy installation script and good HDD detection for setting up the server
2) SMP capable
3) Runs folding automatically on the server and clients
4) Easy configuration GUI when launching the terminal server
5) Runs 2 FAH clients for the server and client machines (does this for the sake of P4's with HT and dualies)
6) Folding monitor superkaramba theme for tracking progress
7) Easy configuration of client.cfg and flags used
8) Uses wine and the widnows folding client so that tinker work units suffer no performance loss
9) The server uses NFS to serve the folding directories from its HDD to client machines. Work is not lost if any machine is rebooted.
10) You'll find the LTSP server has enough software to be used as a desktop machine, ie it can play movies and music, browse the web, produce MS Office documents, instant message on many protocols, etc.

It's not a perfect solution by any means, but probably a lot easier than setting up an LTSP farm from scratch since a lot of the work is done for you. Still have to tackle some Linux learning curve, and you have to make sure that the NICs used are supported and can be used for PXE.
 
thanks for the info, doesnt look like what im wanting, ive got a lot of sub p4 machines that i want to cluster into one "machine" and run work units from.
 
doesn't work that way, clusters have to run programs that are designed to split into parts that can be sent to the individual processors. As far as I know since FAH is not open source no such port has been made.
 
Check out openMosix for clustering. Like nerk01 says FAH needs to be a multi-threaded app to run a single instance in parallel across multiple machines. The openMosix FAQ explains it. It would let you run 4 instances on the 4 machines, but it wouldn't gain you anything. Well, maybe some reliability so that when a machine failed the process would roll over to one that was up. Hmmm...
 
I notice you don't have any NForce boards listed. This is probably a good thing because the nVidia drivers have been problematic with LTSP. I know that some folks have overcome the hurdle, but for an out-of-the-box solution your best bet is to stick with the oldest chipset possible. I'm not one to recommend PC CHips boards, but the Egg did have one at $23.00 the other day with onboard video. That would be worth buying one and testing it out. Since you're looking at onboard video you definitely need to have at least 256 MB of RAM. You may not be able to configure the shared memory below 32 MB, and with only 128MB in the system you'd be really pinched.

Edit: s/borad/board/g
 
Yeah, sorry. Folding@home is already split into tiny pieces so that it can run on thousands or millions of cpu's across the world. The folding client itself is the smallest denominator, and so you cannot have more than one CPU work on the same WU as another CPU. But you can have many CPU's each working on their own WU or multiple WU's, and you can cut costs by opting for an open source OS and diskelss solution.

Some more about Mosix. When Overclockix LTSP was being developed, a Mosix kernel was tested. However Mosix does not work with SMP and even P4 HT technology functions like SMP in linux. So the developer decided to ditch Mosix because of the advantages SMP and HT have with folding@home. It was discovered that the folding benchmark run when initially launching the client does work with Mosix and is sent out to the best free node in a Mosix cluster, however because the folding cores run in linux as several processes, they will not migrate between nodes in a Mosix cluster. And even that sort of cluster is more of a load-balancing cluster, so many jobs can go to nodes where they can get done quickest, rather than all nodes working on one job.
 
I'm planning on using a PCI video board for setup, and then disabling video after they are good to go, so no worries there. They "should" still boot.
 
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