24 core Ikea cluster

posted Apr 23rd 2008 9:11pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: pcs hacks

[Janne] does freelance animation and wanted something with a bit more CPU to get his rendering jobs done. He picked up an Ikea ‘Helmer’ cabinet and refitted it to hold six Intel quad cores, six Gigabyte motherboards with 8GB of ram each and six 400 watt power supplies. He seems happy with it – I think it just needs some custom power wiring and an integrated Gig-E switch to achieve perfection. What? I’m not jealous at all.

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tagged: cluster, dual core, DualCore, ikea, intel, quad core, QuadCore, render farm, RenderFarm

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The site seams to be running pretty slow, anyone got a recent mirror?

Posted at 10:34 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by Wolf

his server is swamped. other than that it looks like a great project :)

Posted at 10:49 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by andrew

plz mirror..

must.. have.. super cluster..

Posted at 10:54 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by tjhow

Damn his server is slow, Mirror anyone? If it would of loaded for me i could of mirrored it. Does anyone have a copy of the html and pics email me a .zip or .rar if you do. jojo1224_999@hotmail.com

Posted at 11:03 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by Joel

I am working on a mirror of the site right now. Should be up within the hour. Will re-post or edit when completed.

Posted at 11:11 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by SgtStein

mirroring should be standard procedure before all us greedy hackaday users destroy sites bandwidths :D

Posted at 11:51 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by Zachary

did he use a single psu for this cluster of machines? i’d really like to try this out with a xen vm cluster…

Posted at 11:52 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by allen

coral caught it! http://www.yxx.se.nyud.net/helmer/

Posted at 11:56 pm on Apr 23rd, 2008 by Jevin

Go Coral!

Posted at 12:00 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Bullwinkle Jones

http://www.yxx.se.nyud.net:8090/helmer/

This seems to have the whole page.

Posted at 12:00 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by ex-parrot

Coral Cache:
http://www.yxx.se.nyud.net/helmer/
Still slow but better than the direct link.
Just put .nyud.net at the end of the domain name of any website. Seriously, look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Content_Distribution_Network

Posted at 12:01 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by ClenchedTeeth

curses… foiled again ;)

Posted at 12:02 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by ex-parrot

He mounted all 6 psu’s so I’m assuming he used them all.

The quoted 400W power draw is most likely all 6 comps combined, at idle of course.

Posted at 12:24 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by thug

New mirror of site here:
http://helmer.sfe.se/

Posted at 1:19 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Janne

i wonder how much power hes sucking down when rendering stuff.

Posted at 1:59 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by tjhow

About 600W when rendering. Fans rev up a bit, but sound level still ok. Sorry for ny slow site. ;)

Posted at 3:20 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Janne

Janne, did you consider PXE booting the cluster? It would have reduced money, power and noise and increased the neat factor. Does your rendering app need local scratch?

Posted at 4:38 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Jason

I want one!!!!
Is there any possibility that he will go into more detail about it?
Soooooooo coool

Posted at 4:38 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by PacketStorm4

:O i want one too! thats pretty cool :D

Posted at 6:47 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Derek Vance

I second the recommendation for PXE boot. I recently set up a cluster and used PXE boot. It turned out to be much easier then I expected. Google for “linux pxe boot”. It was a simple matter of adding a few lines to the dhcpd config file, start a tftpd server, and putting the pxelinux (from syslinux) files in the right place.

Posted at 8:54 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Anonymous Canuck

You know, I wonder how this would compare to the one mini supercomputer that was shown on here before…

This is the exact one, but it’s close enough – Microwulf

Posted at 9:56 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by usmarineguy

Sorry about that, user issues…

microwulf – http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/

it isn’t the exact thing i was thinking of, but it’s close…

Posted at 10:01 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by usmarineguy

“The most amazing is that this machine just costed as a better standard PC”

I think hes trying to say it cost as much as a top of the line rig. And if thats the case I find that hard to believe. just looking at RAM+CPU+Mobos from newegg i have a total of $2,478. I dont know if he got some better deals from the place he got his stuff from but 2.4K is a LOT of money, even for a top of the line rig.

570(mobo)+444(ram)+1464(cpu)

Posted at 10:13 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by chupa

That is really cool. Everybody that does clusters like this make it look easy. As soon as I can get my hands on a few spare computers I suppose I will make a project out of it.

Posted at 10:33 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Mike

@chupa

to be fair, a ‘top of the line’ PC might have a CPU that costs $1000 by itself, and another thousand dollars in video cards.

It’s true you COULD build a pretty solid machine for $1000 (I’ve done it).

Besides, for the amount of power he’s got, it seems like a solid investment, even at full retail. He mentioned he got a deal on the CPUs, so it’d be even ebtter.

Posted at 10:40 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by dirk

janne – can you provide some more details on the software setup?

Your use of FreeNAS as a storage space intrigues me, and I am wondering if it might help me with my son’s problem.

I’m quite new to rendering. My 11 year old has blender installed on our Windows PC. He just recently purhcased an AMD Dual Core system that I installed Ubuntu 7 on and blender 2.44.

(He’s starting to play with lip syncing animations – http://www.flyinglow.ca/matthew)

Posted at 10:55 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by eul)42

So, you say that the cluster was cheap to build. Could we have a better idea on the price? Are we looking at $2000? More? Less?

Posted at 11:57 am on Apr 24th, 2008 by Jeremy

How much did it cost? That’s what I’d like to know.

Posted at 12:20 pm on Apr 24th, 2008 by Dave

lol i have the same ram sticks xD this is a nice and usefull device

Posted at 1:39 pm on Apr 24th, 2008 by Alex McCown

…
“Render jobs that took all night, now gets done in 10-12 min.”

With only 6 computers, how does it get a perfomance boost factor of 40-50X?

Is it maybe comparing an apple to an orange?

“Render jobs that took all night (on a 1GHz Celeron), now gets done in 10-12 min.”

Posted at 2:52 pm on Apr 24th, 2008 by hb

Great idea and wonderful coincidence that this fits so smoothly into an Ikea file cabinet. Another issue is the PC-type hardware being used. I found standard-hardware to be not as reliable as it should be. With six of these boards fixing, debugging and administration can be quite a headache. I would spend some extra bucks to invest in server-hardware.

Posted at 4:23 pm on Apr 24th, 2008 by dave

Does this mean the SouperComputer lives one?
http://www.extremelinux.info/stonesoup/
But I’d have to be certain soupercomputer required much more than 400W of juice. The metal work alone must have taken a week of Sundays to do.

Posted at 4:38 pm on Apr 24th, 2008 by Doug

That’s very nice.

Only a matter of time before we all have computers with 64Gb of ram and 24 cores but I want it now.

Posted at 7:48 pm on Apr 24th, 2008 by Techyguru

I can think of more than a few situations where this could come in handy.

Posted at 8:53 pm on Apr 24th, 2008 by RT (Panzer Time!)

Regarding PXE booting or any other network booting. I’m no tech guy, I just need cpu speed, and just did helmer the dumb-but-fast-and working way ;) …and a really wanted a local swap space in case a fill the memory.

Posted at 7:14 am on Apr 25th, 2008 by Janne

Regarding FreenNAS. I used it because it’s so easy to use, and works with PC, mac and linux/unix. ..and free :) For a home server, you can get a fan-less VIA-luke nano itx card, with 2 sata ports. Get 2x 1TB drives and you have a very good, low cost zero noise home server. Intel have just released the atom chip, and Im realy eager to see it in real life.

Posted at 7:38 am on Apr 25th, 2008 by Janne

Wow that’s kick ass .. I want to make one of those and then mount it on a pedestal that I will pray to every morning and night ! :)

Posted at 7:48 am on Apr 25th, 2008 by DigitalMind

I think the question here is…what are they using all that rendering power for?

Oh – and can anybody say F@H cluster?

Posted at 9:25 am on Apr 25th, 2008 by Ryan

29: I’m sure by ‘all night’ he means when he goes to bed it’s going, and when he wakes up it’s all done.

Posted at 10:01 pm on Apr 27th, 2008 by Kulawend

I ask myself what power he might get if he overclocks those babys. I think he uses Intel Q6600 Quat Processors these can take a clockspeed up to 4 ghz. Just think about what calculation power he might get – maybe up to 50 Gflops!!!

Posted at 6:14 am on May 4th, 2008 by Atlantis

Should’ve bought some PS3s

Posted at 7:10 pm on Jun 18th, 2008 by BC

OMG DUDE and your only running linux!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! wow i congratulate you on that one…. i love your computer……..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted at 8:12 pm on Jul 21st, 2008 by Zayn1000

A friend and I built another version of a 24-core Linux cluster built into a $29.99 Ikea Helmer cabinet. The total cost is $2550.11. The design and implementation is robust and elegant. On my blog, I show how to build it in pictures, breakdown the component costs, talk about air flow, and discuss idle and full speed temperatures. We think our solution is practical and feasible for other people needing a small cluster for specialty applications.

http://obscuredclarity.blogspot.com/2008/09/24-core-linux-cluster-in-2999-case-from.html

Posted at 12:49 pm on Oct 3rd, 2008 by Tim M.

24 core Ikea cluster

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