nice idea, but. He is intending to use heat pipes, and as far as i know they are supposed to be positioned ~vertical (or at least in a way that the hot part is lower than the cold one). he has positioned them ~horizontal so i believe that there will be serious problems. IMO it would be much easier to dispense all that heat with water colling. i would also like to know where is he intending to get/make that kind of case, not to mention custom shaped heatpipes…

Posted at 8:20 am on Jul 5th, 2008 by jelengar

The idea is nice, but i think there is a small problem with the design. What happens if one of the boards or cards has a fault and needs to be replaced. It seems there is going to be a lot of downtime and work required to fix something that should be as simple as swapping out the card.

Posted at 9:18 am on Jul 5th, 2008 by Mark

Helmer 2 -> http://helmer2.sfe.se/ Oops ;)

Posted at 9:58 am on Jul 5th, 2008 by cloudhackix

dang, how do i get on amd’s processor “tester” list, i need something faster than my 4000+ 939 socket single core. and i love the case idea, although i do have to agree, im not sure how effective the cooling will be.
maybe put your motherboards on their sides so the air will rise through the case instead of getting trapped at each level? that would also fix the heat pipe issue too.

Posted at 10:22 am on Jul 5th, 2008 by th3m43

The Helmer 2 link’s not working for me, so here it is.

http://helmer2.sfe.se/

Posted at 10:50 am on Jul 5th, 2008 by Elaki

lol maybe if he’s lucky somebody will send him parts for the helmer III. regardless, this is pretty sweet.

Posted at 11:54 am on Jul 5th, 2008 by peter

This thing is definately going to catch on fire and burn. Absolutely Horrible cooling idea…

Posted at 12:00 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by Gazorp

The software will be a problem. Aren’t plugins for Cinema 4D, Maya, and Autodesk stuff mostly proprietary to studios by in house engineers? I know most Cinema 4D stuff is.

I’ve never seen plugins for the populer clustering frameworks.

Posted at 12:35 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by TJHooker

what tthe HELL could someone do with that sorta power … one kickass game of css o.O

Posted at 1:30 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by alex mccown

Best locate this somewhere were heat is short in supply.

Posted at 2:48 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by Chris

@1
As long as the heat pipes have a wick inside, it’ll be fine. As for custom shaped, you buy straight ones and bend them yourself.

Water cooling in that setup would be way more maintenance.

Posted at 5:40 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by _Matt

I’m with Mark on this one. I like the design but it is very short-sighted. Additionally, i like the CFD work done on how to passively dissipate a shitload of heat. Passively with DIY heatsinks is a bit too “seat of your pants” engineering for my liking.

Water cooling is the way for something like this and with the amount of components in such a setup, accessibility is not something to be overlooked.

Posted at 6:14 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by jono

I checked this out a few days ago, the Helmer III designs have no info about interlinks power servicing or mounting, cooling ain’t that detailed either.

I would love to see a breakdown of the budget. Also I wonder if he plans to have diskless nodes, that is how I would do it, except what would happen when you max out ram on a node without a disk?

Nvidia Gelato seems like the most viable option, but it is not clear on the site weather or not you have to pay for network capeable nodes or not, also I wonder how much bandwidth Gelato uses, if it can saturate a Gb Ethernet line?

Although having many times the processing power for a factor of the price compared to a large reasearch facility could be pretty cool, I wonder if google uses CUDA capable GPUs for any of their computational work?

-edward@nardella.ca

Posted at 7:16 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by Edward Nardella

great case.. honestly asfar as the cooling pipes.. i like that configureation and have seen great things from ALOT less…. one guy i met used a coil of copper tube ans an automotive heater core to cool his rig … coolant was circulated with a windshield washer pump (junkyard hackin at its best lmao

Posted at 7:44 pm on Jul 5th, 2008 by dravin21

If he had this working it would top out both the new Blue Gene supercomputer and the NEC earth simulator in terms of floating point operations. If he doubled the size it’d beat out SETI@HOME.

Posted at 3:28 pm on Jul 6th, 2008 by Solenoidclock

The common belief that heatpipes need to “go up” is not true, the wicking material is what brings the working fluid in contact with the heat source. Double check the design of many video card coolers, their heatpipes are usually hung underneath the card. CPU coolers don’t have their pipes at the top either, the bottom is the half of the pipe that lays horizontally below the cpu when in a tower case.

Don’t worry too much about the vertical orientation of the pipes.

@ th3m43:

“i need something faster than my 4000+ 939 socket single core”

Good luck, I still haven’t found a faster processor from AMD (Mine went 3.0Ghz and had the 1MB lvl2 cache, I have a sneaking suspicion that AMD wouldn’t be so far behind if they had kept that level of performance.)

If Intel would make a single core faster than 2 ghz with more than 512k of ram I am sure it would be awesome, my Conroe-L is great at 3.1ghz, but the cache is still lacking :( .

Posted at 4:38 pm on Jul 6th, 2008 by Miles

Great article

Posted at 2:14 am on Aug 1st, 2008 by Charlie