Grid of OC'ed Intel Core 2 Duo E6600s -- Hardware Components Help

[intelcore2duogrid]

Hello All,

I'm building a computational grid (24 nodes to start) based around the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processors. The machines will run Linux and boot off the network so I have no need for a video card or any drives whatsoever. Would like some help picking the other components (at as low cost as possible!). Thinking about using the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA motherboard (cheap, overclocks well enough, and has onboard gigabit ethernet), and 2 cheap 512MB sticks of PC2 5400. Only need 1GB of RAM (applications are CPU bound and L2 cache of 4MB is very helpful) so was thinking 2x512 would be cheapest.

Any suggestions are welcome! At first I was thinking of putting everything into mini-tower cases, but these don't fit in racks/cabinets at a datacenter well. Will it be possible to cram motherboard, processor+heatsink/fan, and ram into a 2U case? Or do I have to use a mini-tower? Is a 300W power supply sufficient (minimal OC'ing, no video card or drives at all) or do I need 400W? Can I get away with stock Intel heatsink+fan or should I get something else, possibly lower profile, to put in the cases?

Thanks in advance!

 

[TallBill]

Holy wow, I hope that you'll be crunching for the TeAm. Sounds like a fun project. What kind of costs are you looking at?

Sorry that I cant be much help, but I'm sure that someone will come along with a touch of expertise.

You might want to ask this question in another forum though too. Really there are several that it could fit under, with quite a bit of help from each one.

 

[The Borg]

Hi there,

Don't profess to have a lot of experience, but I have built a 6 PC 'grid' so far with plans to extent it to 7 next week and 15 by mid next year when the quad cores come out.

I wanted to have mine run off a network but my experience is not up to scratch so I went with Win 2k and 80 gig drives - also gives me a bit of distributed storage. I have previously had 17 machines (old ones!!!) running off a server machine. Problem there is if the server went down, all went down - remember this is a home setup, so none of the fancy bells and wistles of a proper rig.

Yes, no need for the graphics. My intel boards are great (all mATX for space reasons). Running p4 3.0 GHz. Unfortunately no OC. I use VNC to check the machines. Also only 2 x 256 memory. Plan to upgrade by adding 2 x 512 before I cannot get anymore memory. These machines do nothing other than BOINC. I have others for use.

I have not bothered with a case. They are literally stacked ontop of one another. I put rods though the mounting holes with plastic tube spacers - 125-mm apart and that's that. I did build a big box for them, but cooling was a problem (air). Will build another soon with more space - hence the 125-mm spaceing now. Will also probably go with water cooling. Buy the components seperately and use a car radiator for the whole whack. Will be a whole lot cheaper. One car radiator costs the same as a dinky little PC radiator with many times the surface area. Space wise, this rig will be big.

I use 300W PSU's. You won't need more. No drives, no major graphics. And the CPU's supposidly have less power demand.

One thing to consider is more cores. The setup you describe costs $x. If you add more cores, the overheads - PSU, drives (if applicable) stays ther same. You just get more FLOPS!!!

Hope that helps. I love this...

 

[intelcore2duogrid]

Thanks for the response. We've been actually throwing around the idea of using Woodcrest 5140s instead, but have some concerns on how well these would overclock. Does anyone have experience with overclocking 2 Woodcrest on a server motherboard? If so, can you recommend brand and models? Btw, we had been using BOINC but will probably switch to the Sun N1 Grid Engine if all the machines are colo'ed together.

 

[The Borg]

Try the CPU/Procesors link under categories at left. There arer a lot of guys there that mess around with all sorts of processors. They may be able to help.

 

[Philippart]

can someone please explain me how i can set up a similar network?
how can i bootthe mashines through the network, without graphics card?

thank you very much

 

[The Borg]

1. Graphics. Some modern mobo's have graphics cards built it. Just go for a mobo that has a very basic chip and set the shared memory to it's minimum. Mine are set to 1 meg. If you use VNC, the graphics means nothing. You just need one for the machine to boot. My older machines just had 1 meg (or less ;-)) cards plugged in just to fool the machine into beliving it had a monitor.

2. Network booting. Check the web. This is not easy stuff. I decided it was worth getting cheap hard drives (80gig) rather than trying to get the netboot stuff going. And I then have distributed storage!!! So now I have almost 500 gig of storage. And you can also use Windows or Linux to group that all together to look like one big drive.

3. Setup. I bought 6 identical machines (same mobo, processor and hdd) and installed all the software I needed - Win 2k, drivers, BOINC (with the necessary project files) and then simply ghosted the drives for the other machines. Then you setup the network stuff individually - all need unique IP addresses and names. Connect them all togther and away you go. The 6 machines are literally piled on top of one another. No cases etc. I then connect all the machines through my main machine that has ICS and they can then talk to the internet as needed.

Hope that helps. Ask if you need more help.

 

[Philippart]

oh, i thought you could do that with mainboards without integrated graphics chipset too...

 

[TallBill]

If you do get HD's, Outpost.com has $9.99 10GB drives. Worth looking into at least. I was thinking about building a brick of 3-6 crunching computers when I get back, but not sure if the wife would let that fly.

 

[Crazee]

It has been awhile since I have dabbled with the forbidden science of "crack rack" building. I used to have a crack rack with multiple nodes. I used motherboards with integrated graphics and small HDs.

Now there are motherboards that will boot without a video card as Smoke and I found out trying to troubleshoot a problem he was having with a system. I don't know of a list, but I bet some googling and asking in the motherboard forum could get an answer.

There are many ways to tackle the booting problem. For me I went with hard drives and Windows because at the time the performance of the windows clients was much greater than that of the linux clients. One would have to evaluate client performance in their chosen project to see what setup works best for them.

As for some of the questions intelcore2duogrid asked, I think you would find that 1u or 2u rack mount cases would be expensive compared to other cases. I put shelves in put the motherboards and power supplies on the shelves with cardboard underneath. I didn't bother with cases, but you may not have that option in your datacenter.

I would think that 300W power supplies for just mb, proc and memory would be sufficient if they are of good quality like Antec, etc. Stock heatsink and fan that come with boxed procs would work fine provided you aren't going for high overclocking.