wannabe farmer

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Tony Pinches

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Message 13946 - Posted: 5 Aug 2004, 9:54:27 UTC

As a complete newbie, could someone point me in the direction of any sites/online help that might give me some info and get me started on putting together a decent farm for some serious crunching? Any help appreciated.
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Profile mikey
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Message 13959 - Posted: 5 Aug 2004, 11:35:31 UTC - in response to Message 13946.  

> As a complete newbie, could someone point me in the direction of any
> sites/online help that might give me some info and get me started on putting
> together a decent farm for some serious crunching? Any help appreciated.
>
What kind of help are you looking for? How to network computers, how to put them all crunching for the same account, etc, etc. Even how to aquire computers for a farm? I mean you give no indication of what you arethinking here so it is really hard to try to help until we know where we have to start with you.
I personally have 17 computers currently crunching, 7 for Boinc and 11 for Seti Classic. I think I can help you but need to know how much you already know.

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Tony Pinches

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Message 13985 - Posted: 5 Aug 2004, 14:24:18 UTC

I guess what I'm after is a place to start myself, so I'm sorry I wasn't more specific. Let me try again! I guess I need to know about how to network computers, is it best to use complete computers and leave them complete or to strip out the boards and connect those together? What level of CPU is minimum requirement to make it worthwhile? If there are websites addressing this kind of stuff, I'm happy to slog through reading a tonne of stuff to learn but I've not been able to find anything yet (nothing at a level that means much to me anyway). I'm not sure if that makes it much clearer - basically I'm interested in putting together a farm, although reasonably techie, I've not done this before and don't have a lot of experience networking computers, so I was looking for a place to start looking...
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Janus
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Message 13990 - Posted: 5 Aug 2004, 15:06:10 UTC - in response to Message 13985.  
Last modified: 5 Aug 2004, 15:09:20 UTC

Either you buy 10 PSUs, 10 motherboards with built in network cards, 10 fast CPUs and 10x512mb ram or you use old computers from somewhere else.

You don't have to have cabinets to all of them - it's cheaper to build some kind of holder to the motherboards and simply stack them using that instead. The PSUs can be stacked as well and help provide airflow around the motherboards and CPU. Add a router, switch or hub (depending on what you want) to the setup and you're done =)

If you don't buy harddrives you need to boot and run the system off a network partition somewhere.

It's going to be noisy (place it somewhere out of sight - not too warm and NO dust) and use loads of power (ensure that your wires can handle it) - but then you have a small farm. Now what do you want to use it for?
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ric
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Message 14052 - Posted: 5 Aug 2004, 18:16:29 UTC - in response to Message 13946.  

> As a complete newbie, could someone point me in the direction of any
> sites/online help that might give me some info and get me started on putting
> together a decent farm for some serious crunching? Any help appreciated.


Tony,

just take a look to the

SETI Stack and farm systems

There is a lot of informations, pictures of farms, how they did and much more.

May it gives you some answers...

ric






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Profile The Pirate
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Message 14167 - Posted: 6 Aug 2004, 0:10:54 UTC

Look for a motherboard that has both onboard video and NIC. You can find one for less that $60. Buy a boxed cpu that comes with a heat sink and fan. If you buy all new parts you can put togother a "system" without a case for around $200. If you plan on building several, you only have to buy one cheap CD rom to install the OS . You can reuse the CD rom on each system. Use a free version of linux or buy one that allows unlimited installs on your personal computers such as Xandros.
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Jason Ebacher

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Message 14178 - Posted: 6 Aug 2004, 0:59:59 UTC

I will give you some pointers..

Depends onwhat you want to do.. 1 personaly recomend using used surplus computers, if you can get them , check with local companies and or put a small add in the paper, its surprising what a company considers "old" for intance 6 months ago my company got rid of most of the pc's that were under 1.5 GHZ and were not "company standard"... Now thats just my company that doesn't have powerusers all over, if you find the right company, you could score quite a crapload of very usefull pc's.. for free.. Just pose it this way they have to pay to get rid of the pc's if you come in a outside person they and say i will take any pc's off your hands for free and then also state that they will be referbished and go into a research project like seti or find a drug, they may decide to replace more pc's that were not going to be replaced.

I made a floppy disk that boots and starts the seti classic app... I dont have one for boinc, I also did a cd rom version.. this makes great sence, less parts, network booting is also a great option but it requires some linux skils.

Case or caseless is your option for the computers...

Power and Heat are big concerns... I just instlled a 12,000 btu AC unit in my computer room so it would cool the room, its over kill but I only have 10 pc's in there, For Power these ten pc's will draw over 15 amps and blow the breaker in the room, the AC is on a dedicated 20 amp circuit... I will be installing a special 30 amp circuit for my farm, I have 15 more computers to add to the farm, but can't power them up or the breaker will blow...as I sit now... So my farm now is 5 to 7 pc's depending on what in doing...

My master plan is to do caseless "seti stack" style systems that network boot.. or boot from CD or floppy... but I will have over 25 600Mhz machines crunching away 24/7.. On Seti and the Find a Drug project. Im still finalizing my design but thats the plan... Its not a cheap hobby, but its fun..

I havefound that Boinc is harder to deal with, it hooks the OS so doing bootable floppy and or CD's is more complicated on boinc... I'm currently mainly running the original SETI CLI.

Hope this helps.
<a> [/url]
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Tony Pinches

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Message 14242 - Posted: 6 Aug 2004, 7:37:15 UTC

Okay, thanks everyone for the help. I think that gives me some ideas as to where to start, and when I do start I'm sure you'll hear from me again when I can't get it to work!!
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Profile Paul D. Buck
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Message 14326 - Posted: 6 Aug 2004, 15:13:15 UTC - in response to Message 14242.  

> Okay, thanks everyone for the help. I think that gives me some ideas as to
> where to start, and when I do start I'm sure you'll hear from me again when I
> can't get it to work!!

One more sea story.

I did mine the slow way. Everytime I upgraded I woiuld buy a new Antec style case and MB/CPU until I had 10 boxes. From there as I upgraded the "old" slower machine would fall off the far end and over time my farm grew slowly.

A copy of the boxes I just bought the on sale MB/CPU combo that Frys was selling. I kept that going for nearly 4 years. Recently the spouse put the foot down so I had to get rid of the 4 that were in the guest bedroom (did not make sense to me, we rarely have a guest - so I thought it was good to keep the room useful).

Most of the machines I ran windows because I used the MSDN subscription to install the OS. The primary reason I did that is that I use SETI Driver and SETI Spy to queue and report the WU. This is a compromise set-up and you would likely be better off with the Linux client, speed wise, but the care and feeding of the linux I felt was not worth the incremental increase in speed. When BOINC with a GUI goes live on Linux I will likely convert to that standard.

For power I use an APC 3000 and it has room to hold up all 10 systems with a little additional room. For that I installed a 220 line to the "computer-room" and for AC I got a 4 ton AC for the house. It still gets hot in the computer room, but what the heck.

You can use a KVM switch to control multiple computers (in boxes or not) so you can have 4 or 8 (for the low end switches) computers on one display/keyboard/mouse ...





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Message boards : Number crunching : wannabe farmer


 
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