Why people keep putting in a hard drive for each node is something that baffles me.

Otherwise nice build. Off to look at the details.

Posted at 4:41 pm on Oct 4th, 2008 by Edward Nardella

Looks really cool. I would have chosen Intel quad cores but thats just me. There is a vid on youtube where an AMD and an Intel Quad core race to render some video. Same specs except processors, and the Intel was much faster.

Posted at 4:56 pm on Oct 4th, 2008 by Ian

ian: i agree, i went with intel quad core because it outperformed amd in all the benchmarks i could find. hopefully the amd choice was financially-based.

Posted at 8:53 pm on Oct 4th, 2008 by andrew

Would this be faster than a commodore 64?

are there reasonable dual processor motherboards available, so you could get eight cores per unit?

Posted at 10:43 pm on Oct 4th, 2008 by pal

@pal
cheap dual socket botherboards don’t support quadcore processors.

Posted at 6:31 am on Oct 5th, 2008 by aoeu

I don’t get the use of hard disks on the nodes either, PXE/NFS boot works. Though it does add to the network load.

Several years ago I built a cluster with some surplus gear and it was very easy to saturate the network. I always wished I had a gig switch for it.

Another thing to not forget is power usage, it adds up fast and the “Boss” told me to shut it down after the first months power bill was $100 higher. :)

Posted at 9:55 am on Oct 5th, 2008 by Kyle

This cluster was designed with a specific task in mind. The use of hard drives on each node was because each node is processing a *large* chunk of data (cant be broken in to smaller chunks without massive headaches) and the network could not support the increase in load as the cluster scaled. We are not rendering. As far as Intel versus AMD, maybe the next Helmer will be Intel inside. The take-away message is that an IKEA Helmer fits the goods like a glove with minimal mods and doesn’t look like a rats-nest(see previous Helmer mod).

~guy that helped build it

Posted at 11:17 am on Oct 5th, 2008 by mbean

Schreiber einer Rezession nicht verstehen, die behaupten er kann keine festen Schrauben loesen… also den, den ich habe kann das.
Erstes Einsatzgebiet nach dem Kauf war das abnehmen einer Unterkonstruktion einer Holzdecke. Hat voll durchgehalten und mir die Arbeit sehr erleichtert.

Andy

Posted at 4:00 am on Oct 16th, 2008 by Heimwerken