IKEA Linux Cluster


Building a render cluster doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of money, even if you’re buying brand new hardware. [Janne] built this 6 unit cluster inside of a 6 drawer IKEA Helmer cabinet. He wanted the cluster to be low power and low cost. After finding a good price on 6 65nm Intel Core 2 CPUs, he found 6 cheap Gigabyte motherboards. The memory on each board was maxed at 8GB. With 24 2.4GHz cores consuming 400W, the power consumption and cost isn’t much more than a high end PC. Each board is running Fedora 8 and mounts an NFS share. Dr Queue is used to manage the render farm’s processes. [Janne] says jobs that previously took all night now only require about 10-12 minutes. The estimated capacity is 186Gflops, but plans are already in motion for a12Tflop version.

His site also has plans for an underwater camera housing like our recent post. If you want to see more IKEA abuse, check out IKEA Hacker, even if it’s not very technical.

[via Hackzine]

[UPDATE: yep, we duped ourselves]

11 thoughts on “IKEA Linux Cluster

  1. Deja Vu a rhyme, it is impossible to
    experance Deja Vu for the very first time,
    The first time it happens is the second…

    Deja Vu a rhyme, it is impossible to
    experance Deja Vu for the very first time,
    The first time it happens is the second…

    (Part of a poem by Les Barker called Deja Vu – avalible on a CD called “A Cardi and Bloke” – DOG11)

  2. well hello, sean percival.
    while it is good to see that hack a day has included new writers, it is not good to see a decrease in overall writing quality. while there have been double posts before (http://www.hackaday.com/2008/03/22/semi-duplicate-post-extra/ – apology), they have been extremely rare. I hope that this was a one-time mistake.
    it would be a disservice to the hacker community to see such a wonderful blog go down the drain due to its founder sourcing-out posts to other, lesser skilled writers. perhaps we are trying to imitate the hardware being featured today, no?
    signed: bgugi, with all care for the blog i love

  3. Not trying to be funny I love the site but I would expect a new writer to of had an interest in the site previously so would recognise articles which have allready been shown, esepecially when they were posted only a short time ago.

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