Super cheap folding farm

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Mohonri

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 29, 2005
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Some guy got linux to run on those little MSN-TV boxes, and built himself a nice little cluster. Here are the hardware specs of each box:

733mhz Celeron
128MB RAM
2 x USB
Ethernet
64MB CF card

Apparently the guy got the node cost down to about $1 per box. The publicity (on engadget, digg, and hackaday) will likely drive up the price on eBay for a while, but it's still super cheap.

 
Interesting project. I wonder how many watts these things pull under full load, and if a fan would be needed if they were always at full load.
 
He mentions them drawing 12v at 2a, for 24 watts, give or take. That means you can run 4 of these in what a single p4 (just the chip!) takes; not a terrible tradeoff, given that they're pretty and cheap as dirt. The chipset is really low power-draw, which helps, and it's obviously last-generation technology. Still, FAH doesn't care much about cache or sse2/3, from what I can tell, so they'd make good farm machines. They get the official mage Stamp of Approval.

 
unhappy_mage said:
He mentions them drawing 12v at 2a, for 24 watts, give or take. That means you can run 4 of these in what a single p4 (just the chip!) takes; not a terrible tradeoff, given that they're pretty and cheap as dirt. The chipset is really low power-draw, which helps, and it's obviously last-generation technology. Still, FAH doesn't care much about cache or sse2/3, from what I can tell, so they'd make good farm machines. They get the official mage Stamp of Approval.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's pretty good on power compared to a normal desktop. My 1.86GHz Pentium M laptop barely uses more than that though. On the other hand, for even $5 initial purchase price, it could make a great folding farm, although the ram is most likely a bit low for large WUs.
 
Wow, have you measured that draw? The spec sheets say 12-25W TDP for the 1.73 chip IIRC. That's pretty good for a whole machine. Sounds like if I win the lottery I should buy dualcore pentium M's. Given the odds of me winning said lottery without buying a ticket, they'll have them ready for me ;)

Yeah, probably not enough ram for big WUs, but I don't think I'd put them on anything but small or timeless anyways. Stanford prefers results back quickly.

 
unhappy_mage said:
Wow, have you measured that draw? The spec sheets say 12-25W TDP for the 1.73 chip IIRC. That's pretty good for a whole machine. Sounds like if I win the lottery I should buy dualcore pentium M's. Given the odds of me winning said lottery without buying a ticket, they'll have them ready for me ;)

Yeah, probably not enough ram for big WUs, but I don't think I'd put them on anything but small or timeless anyways. Stanford prefers results back quickly.

Click to expand...

I haven't measured my laptop since I went from 512MB of 2GB of ram, and I've also undervolted the core under full load from default(1.31 or so) to 1.125(something close to that).

When I did measure it last, it pulled 33 watts under full load(FaH) with the screen closed. It might pull even less now with the undervolt. I need to pull my kill-a-watt mater off my desktop and see what the laptop is pulling now.
 
Mohonri said:
The publicity (on engadget, digg, and hackaday) will likely drive up the price on eBay for a while, but it's still super cheap.

Click to expand...


I saw this link on hackaday earlier today, and the link didn't work there. Your link dosent seem to work for me either. So I'm guessing that the publicity overwhelmed their web server too.
 
It just worked for me. So, can this be setup to pull fold server? You can put quite a lot of those on a single power strip. I mean adding 7.3 GHz to a farm might not be bad for $10 -20 bucks. :cool:
 
I'm going to have to keep an eye on ebay for one of these sounds like a fun project. I'm also wondering if you could fold server these.
 
avey said:
I'm going to have to keep an eye on ebay for one of these sounds like a fun project. I'm also wondering if you could fold server these.
Click to expand...
This would be THE perfect use for fold-server. mage, marty, I think there's some interest in seeing you do this...

 
upriverpaddler said:
I saw this link on hackaday earlier today, and the link didn't work there. Your link dosent seem to work for me either. So I'm guessing that the publicity overwhelmed their web server too.
Click to expand...
It seems to be back up for me, but you can try the coral mirror if it still isn't working for you.

It should be *really* easy to turn one of these into a fold-server box - flash the BIOS, put the Etherboot "elf" image on instead of a kernel, boot from network... but I'd have to try it ;) Just looking at eBay, it looks like the supply is drastically depleted - only three on the search for "msn web tv". But if you could find one, you could easily do it.

 
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