The Jupiter Cluster

[lilfiend]

A few weeks ago a few buddies and I were having a little lan party and towards the end we starting talking about how nice it would be if we didn't have to bring all of our main computers to have a lan party, and thus the idea was born!

The specs played down to this
4x amd e-350 apu's
4gb ddr3 each
a case
4x 320gb 2.5" hdd's
pico psu's
a 12v power supply
????
Profit


We wanted to include everything (screens/keyboard/mice) but we settled on 4 computers and mice/keyboards for all of them. Now we are pretty close to being done with this but one of the motherboards died last night so now we have to do an rma. And to top that bad news my website got hacked and my images folder got deleted, so i'm missing quite a lot of pictures just now, but i will update this thread later tonight with more pictures. The reason it is called The Jupiter Cluster is because we wanted to name the computers after Jupiter's four largest moons, Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa....Yeah, we're a bit nerdy but it gave us a name!



ok so here is the original power supply we were going to use, just did straight up 120v ac to 12v dc on two channels, we were going to wire 2 pc's to each channel and it was all going to be fine and dandy

Pic of the PSU

The psu with a pc power cable spliced up into it

WIRE TIME!?

Dat wires

Is that? why yes it is! PARALLEL WIRING!!!

trying it out on one rail (unit was supposed to be able to handle it)

The whole test jungle

You can see here we switched to using two rails

you like teh ram? yeah, you like teh ram

mmmm heatsink... /homer

Pico psu! (note its only a 20+4 pin but works JUST fine)



Here is them in a test enviroment

Testing the newly christened motherboards (this is Io)

Another shot of IO, including its HDD

AWWWWWWW IIIIOOOOO

Some Callisto for you guys!?

Aww look how simple it all looks



alright enough of those motherboards all seperate like lets get them together

We originally were using spacers instead of washers, but it wasn't the best idea we had

oh man those short looking cables start to look messy when we jam them all right next to eachother

That's right, we goodwill'd this shit up, vga style

Dat Tower

Got all 4 on there finally! You may notice that we only had enough spacers for 3 corners of each motherboard.

Ruffels anyone?

A little bit of forhead love for the ports? Or just a creeper who likes baby motherboards? You decide!

This is the power supply we ended up using, its 700w (way over-powered) but certain voltages on it don't play nice, thank god the 12v was just fine

SO MANY WIRES!!!! and stoopid spacers...

Look at all that computing power, and look how small it seems outside the case

Gotta love it when the 4p power wire is like 3 inches long, extension cables FTW

All wired up and turned on for the first time, windows 7+steam+ninite=superfast setup!



Time for some case love?

You can see here the back part of the case we had to cut out for the 4 motherboards.

Back shot of case

Another angle

Here is a test fit of the 4 motherboards, we ended up using some really long 8-32 threaded rods with nuts to hold all the boards in place (home depot+lowes FTW!)

Some pretty end caps+washers to distribute the weight a little

A shot from the back with the motherboards loaded

A little action shot

The cables!

You can see the power switch cables we cut up, with one button all the pc's turn on, when we first tested it the computer would just instantly turn on then shutdown, but we found out that was because we were pluging wires in differently on the motherboards, and since they were wired in parallel they would short eachother and act as if the power button was being held down

Mmmmm motherboards+power supply love (not wired up though)

The sides fit!

Action shot through the case window

 

[xDezor]

Those pictures are gigantic. Think you could scale them down a little? (Just for people who don't have displays larger than 1920x1080...)

What games do you guys lan with? Seeing as there are no videocards aside from the onboard.

 

[jojo69]

hell yeah!

what games you guys playing?

 

[lilfiend]

we mostly play games like warcraft III frozen throne, Total Annihilation, UT, UT2k4, Magicka, Gmod, Half Life, Half life 2 deathmatch

basically the good games, and since consoles rolled about their hasn't been any new ones we've wanted to add besides supreme commander, but thats another build for another time

and yes i'll resize the pictures for you guys in a bit here!

 

[dieseldog49]

Love it!

 

[Jorona]

Thats a great idea. I think I would have opted of an FM1 platform for abit more graphics prowess, but none the less an awesome idea.

 

[bonnev659]

looks pretty neat

 

[USF-Nealio]

That is an absolutely awesome idea and execution! If you space them out a little more, you could probably fit a half height PCI-E card if you wanted.

 

[cvgd]

Any chance you can provide more info on the power supply wiring? I'm intrigued by the build here.

 

[CMadki4]

Holy crap, that is wicked! I love it. Totally unique. Dangerous when you get a bunch of nerds together Nicely done so far. I've love to see these spaced out enough for GPUs. Can't wait to see the end result and the cable management you come up with!

 

[lilfiend]

Updated the first post with new pictures!

also, the cpu's are the limiting factor in these setups, not the gpu's so i'm not so worried about pcie cards.... for now....

 

[bonnev659]

pretty cool

love the close up of the Ram

 

[Deleted member 12930]

clean up those wires! Looks great though!

Any more plans for the case?

 

[Morphes]

I like the idea sir!

Seems like you should prepare for video cards, just in case theres a game that you all want to play *COUGH* Diablo 3 *COUGH* that the onboard cant handle. I don't know if you plan to put anything in the PSU area of the case but you could def put some video cards down there. Just a thought.

Regardless, Looks awesome man and I think its mad cool you guys decided to do that.

 

[jojo69]

lol

I just saw the $1.99 goodwill VGA cable

nice

 

[lilfiend]

clean up those wires! Looks great though!

Any more plans for the case?

we've been toying with the idea to build our own case, but we don't have the skill-set to do it confidently, but we may still take a couple whacks at it.

As for the current case we were thinking about getting it painted but what exactly we would do and how we would pay for it has kind of slowed that idea down a lot.

I like the idea sir!

Seems like you should prepare for video cards, just in case theres a game that you all want to play *COUGH* Diablo 3 *COUGH* that the onboard cant handle. I don't know if you plan to put anything in the PSU area of the case but you could def put some video cards down there. Just a thought.

Regardless, Looks awesome man and I think its mad cool you guys decided to do that.

pssh who would want to play a new game these days? $60+$15 zero day dlc?

though we may look into adding video cards at some point, right now its not a priority, plus i imagine we will probably use half height cards to keep things manageable, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

lol

I just saw the $1.99 goodwill VGA cable

nice

Thanks for noticing! works like a dream i tell ya, all 15 pins! we've got 3 monitors from goodwill too for about $15-$20 each in case we don't want to take our own monitors just need to get a good deal on another one and we'll be set!

 

[USF-Nealio]

You should try to integrate a 8 port switch into the case so that you always stay interconnected, and only have to connect 1 cable to have internet connectivity.

 

[Jorona]

You should try to integrate a 8 port switch into the case so that you always stay interconnected, and only have to connect 1 cable to have internet connectivity.

They only need a 5-port, but yes, I agree. Then you guys could lan without a lan, a true self contained lan party.

 

[lilfiend]

You should try to integrate a 8 port switch into the case so that you always stay interconnected, and only have to connect 1 cable to have internet connectivity.

we actually have a 5 port wireless router we are going to throw in it, but the build is still on hold while we wait for the rma approval from asus.

EDIT: Also i wanted to throw a tablet in the front of the case (novo 7 elf), i want it to display temps of the computers but is there anything else that may be a little cooler for it to do that you guys would prefer to see?

a couple other ideas i had:
1. throw some speakers into the case and finding a visualization app and running music off of it at lan parties
2. set up some sort of slide show that has a crap-ton of pictures of jupiter and the four moons we've named the computers after

feel free to throw in other idea's!

 

[USF-Nealio]

If you had the capacity, adding a 5th board and using at as a server would be pretty cool. You could then run an LCD (instead of a tablet) that could be mounted to the case, and it could then provide temps as well as show scores for competitive games.

 

[lilfiend]

If you had the capacity, adding a 5th board and using at as a server would be pretty cool. You could then run an LCD (instead of a tablet) that could be mounted to the case, and it could then provide temps as well as show scores for competitive games.

that would actually cost about the same but we already have the tablet so i'm just making due.

If it helps at all i've got ubuntu 11.10 armel on the novod also, but it has issues installing random packages, like openjdk wont install (icedtea and all that)

 

[Arcygenical]

Please, please, please make some awesome custom cables for this setup.

 

[HAF72]

Pretty cool project! Never thought of that! Probably not powerful enough to play BF3 though

 

[lilfiend]

Please, please, please make some awesome custom cables for this setup.

i've never sleeved wires, but might as well try it!

Pretty cool project! Never thought of that! Probably not powerful enough to play BF3 though

you'd be correct, but then again, you can't play bf3 without internet connection or run your own servers, so in some situations we would be unable to play it even if the computers were capable.

 

[lilfiend]

Long overdue update!

The Jupiter Cluster has been on hold for months now, but finally we have picked it back up!

a quick teaser at what we are planning/working on!

I know its not much but it feels great to be working on it again! Wen't down to Lowes today to pick up some wood for it but haven't started cutting anything yet, hopefully we get some serious work done soon!

Note: basically all of the modeling was obtained from Google Sketchup's warehouse and exported to Cinema 4d so I could work on it.

EDIT: Just to add its only 43 centimeters long, 35 tall, and 25 cm deep!

 

[bigmac11]

Cool idea and good execution

 

[jojo69]

about time

and I mean that in the most positive and encouraging way

 

[lilfiend]

Another update!

Did some major "wtf are we doing" and decided to re-design stuff a bit, new renders will be done when I kick myself into gear again, but for now, WOOD, and lots of it!

no not that kind!

The old JC (down 1 motherboard with the power supply removed)

Measuring stuff!

Serious measuring action!

Cut twice measure once?

MORE CUTTING!

All cut!

Thats all for today but more to come, hopefully soon!

 

[lilfiend]

More updates!

All the wood laid out and cut!

Getting the corner posts on (1" square posts, the base is 1/4" thick mdf)

OH NO! even with math and double checking our numbers we managed to leave about an inch and a half gap!

To make up for this we are thinking we'll just cut out a backplate or something.

another action shot!

 

[mundivalur]

Like

 

[Deleted member 12930]

That's a pretty big mistake! Lol