A cluster in your closet ?....

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Flerbizky

Flerbizky

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Flerbizky
This is pretty impressive (if you're a 1337 g33k and like this stuff that is) - a 12 node Cluster build with Vias Mini-ITX boards...
Glen's cluster looks to be equivalent to at least 4 (maybe 6) 2.4Ghz Pentium IV boxes in parallel on a similar network - achieving a performance of around 3.6 GFLP.
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cluster0002.jpg


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I couldn't quite work out what the hell it was at first with that image. This one is slightly better I think:

cluster0001L.jpg


Impressive indeed. 👍
 
LoudMusic
I'll second that notion. I see no ventalation in the closet - I bet they've got dead hardware every month or so.
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These Via boards run very very cool.. Have one in a box with no fans, and just a single haddrive... Uptime now is 87 days, last time it was 127, but I had to boot due to a little cleaning / moving in the ... ehhrmmm... office...

The ones in the cluster doesn't even HAVE harddrives.. Plenty of space in there..
 
Flerbizky
These Via boards run very very cool.. Have one in a box with no fans, and just a single haddrive... Uptime now is 87 days, last time it was 127, but I had to boot due to a little cleaning / moving in the ... ehhrmmm... office...

The ones in the cluster doesn't even HAVE harddrives.. Plenty of space in there..
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Hang on, don't you store the MBR on the hard drive? :odd:
 
A friend of mine was net-booting his firewall for a while. Got a ROM burned by a local guy for a few bucks and stuck it in his NIC. It boots, loads a Linux micro-kernal, then searches for the server with its root partition. Something to that effect anyway. Then runs everything over the network. It's not fast by any means, especially since he's doing it with a 10mbit card, but it's not bad. I can totally see this being more prevelant in large installations using gigabit instead. That would actually make them faster, if the file system server had like 10 drives stripped or something.
 
LoudMusic
A friend of mine was net-booting his firewall for a while. Got a ROM burned by a local guy for a few bucks and stuck it in his NIC. It boots, loads a Linux micro-kernal, then searches for the server with its root partition. Something to that effect anyway. Then runs everything over the network. It's not fast by any means, especially since he's doing it with a 10mbit card, but it's not bad. I can totally see this being more prevelant in large installations using gigabit instead. That would actually make them faster, if the file system server had like 10 drives stripped or something.
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Most newer NICs will let you boot a predifined image off a BOOTP server... And yes - with a serious uplink and a speedy server, it works quite well....
 
Besides being really cool, is there any practical benefit to building a cluster with PS2s rather than regular hardware?
 
skip0110
Besides being really cool, is there any practical benefit to building a cluster with PS2s rather than regular hardware?
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Yea, from what i've read on the topic, their reason was the Emotion Engine's vector capabilities or something like that.

The PS2's Emotion Engine CPU has two "vector units" that are designed to manipulate 3-D polygon graphics for gaming. Sony's Linux Kit (for PlayStation 2) provides programmers direct access to the vector units in the CPU, allowing them to be used for these non-graphics tasks.
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Using the cluster, they get to make use of that. I think the ps2 cluser was done more as a scientific experiment in itself than with a true reason in mind. Plus the cost of this is probably a hell of a lot lower than using desktop components in a cluster.
 
emad
Yea, from what i've read on the topic, their reason was the Emotion Engine's vector capabilities or something like that.



Using the cluster, they get to make use of that. I think the ps2 cluser was done more as a scientific experiment in itself than with a true reason in mind. Plus the cost of this is probably a hell of a lot lower than using desktop components in a cluster.
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Except that you get more umph per unit in AMD chips than you do in PS2 units. Even when the PS2 came out I bet you would have a hard time justifying using them rather than building something yourself.

The "scientific experiment in itself" makes more logical sense to me.
 
LoudMusic
Except that you get more umph per unit in AMD chips than you do in PS2 units. Even when the PS2 came out I bet you would have a hard time justifying using them rather than building something yourself.

The "scientific experiment in itself" makes more logical sense to me.
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Exactly - The "It's Science" part makes ANY stupid idea valid !....
 
LoudMusic
Well I wouldn't go so far as to call it stupid. It's a step toward ... something ... (:
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Ohh... I wasn't exactly referring to neither the PS2, nor the Via cluster.. It was more of a generalization - Anything, however stupid it may be, which you, can claim, is for the case of science, is justifiable, by default...
 
Stinky Chicken
Twelve. Point. Five. Teraflop.

Are you ****ing joking?
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The highest it will peak at is 20.25 Teraflops I believe. :D
 
Oh yeah .. I left that out .. sorry. :D

Its currently #7 and only costed a fraction of what the EarthSim in Japan did to produce.
 
After looking at all these great detailed sites, and all the information on how to build/operate such a system, I still see little purpose for me to build one of my own. In fact, I can't find any reason to, besides the inevitable "because I can."

Maybe that's just me.
 
Once you get into 3d animation and the crazy computational math related stuff that scientists do, you'll understand the need for clustered computing.
 
emad
Once you get into 3d animation and the crazy computational math related stuff that scientists do, you'll understand the need for clustered computing.
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One of these would actually make quite a nice render farm - and bloody cheap as well.. These boards with 800Mhz CPUs costs around 900 DKK which is something like US$ 150....

Now I want one as well :irked:
 

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