Please, please, please. BE LESS CRYPTIC WITH YOUR LINKS. Yes, I am well aware that I can hover my mouse over the link and look down at the bottom of my browser to see where it is supposed to go. But that requires me to take my lazy eyes and move them from the article. This makes my lazy eyes sleepy and then i just close the browser.

Please think of my lazy eyes :<

Seems like cooling would be a major problem after the cabinet is fully populated.

Doesn’t seem to have ANY advantage over a standard rack and 1U/2U systems.

And lets not even get started on using desktop i7 cpu’s with non-ecc ram in a over heated server cluster.

Nice Setup

for the ones complaining about cooling

it seems to me the room is airconditioned and the drawers are lacking a bottom

so if you switch on the fan on the bottom, the whole cabinet gets cooled big time

do you guys actually READ/WATCH an entry before you comment?

Wow.

I hope that hardware doesn’t fry when the $20 fan in the bottom gives out.

Man, that just seems like a huge waste of work for the end result. Why not just build a DIY rackmount and get some 1U or 2U chassis and do it that way? Seems it would be way easier to service/cool, and it would look better too, not to mention that looks like an EMI nightmare…

looks cool, although the boss sounds like sean connery.

@Jake/vonskippy

Rack stuff is annoying as heck, unless someone else is paying for it. Overpriced, non-standard, and generally a pain as far as I’m concerned. Stuck in a datacenter where reliabilty and space are paramount – it’s worth it. For something like this though, being able to use standard components probably cost 20% of what the equivalent done with 1/2U rack machines. ECC/Server level stuff has it’s place, but they aren’t exactly curing cancer or running wallstreet on the thing. Just making pretty pictures.

Ohshii…
And here I thought I might have a few days left to finally put some work in finishing a web-page with build-info, specs, considerations, media and free drinks.

Having said that: Yaaay, I/We’re on hack-a-day!

Check back later at http://justacluster.sociallife.org/.. I’m out for a day at the zoo for the rest of today.

Oh, and yes, Arduino-support is planned.

I wonder if you could use a spare lateral file cabinet. I think that would seem to work better imo.

WOW! that’s pure geekporn!

@MrWazoo,

Simply placing a fan in the bottom of the cabinet and putting the cabinet in an air conditioned room doesn’t ensure adequate cooling. When you’re talking about a stack that’s likely going to draw over a kilowatt of power (assuming a very low 250W per drawer), you have to be a lot more careful planning the airflow.

For example, if they place four drawers of equipment in this cabinet, the bottom drawer will get fresh air just fine. But it will exhaust heated air out the top. The next drawer up will be sucking heated air in, and exhausting even hotter air. When they get to the top drawer, it will be exactly the same as if they placed a 750W heater beneath their PC.

Commercial rackmount equipment addresses the issue by drawing fresh air in from the front of the cabinet and exhausting the hot air out the back like a chimney.

They might be able to reduce some heat by sharing power supplies. There’s no reason to have four independent power supplies (each producing some amount of waste heat) when they could use one larger supply to power all four boards in a drawer.

I think they’d be better off if they planned for water cooling. In a liquid cooled environment, they could transfer the heat to radiators located well away from the cabinet and away from each other. They would still need the airflow through the stack to cool the rest of the components, such as the RAM, the north and south bridges, and the hard drives, but the heat management problems would be much lower than they would be trying to use airflow alone.

And while the Blender logo grille at the top is extremely cool looking, I’m thinking they’ll eventually have to replace it with an actual duct to vent the hot air out of the building, at least during the summer months.

John

@Doug

I dunno, man. Have you seen how cheap the generic 1U/2U stuff has gotten? Methinks they could have built a system that would be much better in the long run for just a little more. I guess it just depends on how long they even plan to use this toaster.

Speaking of which, this unit should make some killer toast, especially in the upper drawers! :D

@kris.. “those” dutch people have done more in a day than you will ever do in your lifetime.

Oh and Ton knows more about computers and programming than you ever hope to.

…continued from previous post:

The cooling is taken care of in the sense that the big fan takes care of dumping the heat generated by the cabinet’s processors quite efficiently out the top into the cabinet’s environment. As long as you keep the room reasonably cool, things should be fine. Also, thermal management and monitoring are being used to mitigate problems (as do built-in safeguards in modern motherboards/cpu’s).

The cabling has been pre-done; each drawer has a total of 6 ethernet-cables (4 for direct use; 2 ‘just in case’) and one power-cable that leads to a 4-way socket-block that connect to the PSU’s. They’ve been wired and bundled in such a way that each drawer can fully extend for it’s full length out of the front of the cabinet while the boards are kept powered on. Only issue is cooling, then; but four boards seem to keep cool well enough on their own when exposed to open air (thermal venting).

The power-consumption on 4 boards , in idle, was around 1.6Amps @ 220V with 80%+ PSU’s. Under load, it moved to about 2.2A , tops. That’s about 2000Watt of heat production to remove from the cabinet and room; luckily we have an option of venting to/from a cool concrete hallway right next door; as well as an (as of yet) optional air conditioning unit (sadly not a split-unit, but at least it dumps hot-air out the back through a hose)

As far as performance goes: yes, GPU rendering would’ve been wonderful, if it’d have been anywhere close to production ready at this point for the Durian project (http://durian.blender.org). As we say in dutch ‘Je moet roeien met de riemen die je hebt’ (you gotta row with the oars you DO have).

Excellent cluster! Justa, my friend you have the knack! They’re going for 12 i7 boards in that cluster or 16? Anyways well done wish I had the funds for that kind of “giv’er”!

@Justa, the power usage looks a bit low, if I did the maths right, the increase is 33watts from idle to load per PC, not much for CPUs rated 130 and with Intel very aggresive power saving. In reviews I found, the variation is 91 or 92 watts (hexus 207-116, bit-tech 216-124). So at idle the systems haven’t all the power savings on, or the load isn’t so big, or some other reason I’m unable to figure.

And a pity you found no 1156 boards and had to go with 1366 socket, they should do fine with 4 sticks of 2GB, the CPUs are even lower power but with similar performance (or better when running one process, like non parallel parts of Blender). Whatever was saved in the mobo would cover the extra stick.

Next we need to see a cluster cooled by geothermal.

Bah, so useless. Blender is dead.

I am impressed, and would like to have one too.

But being as I’m saving money to build my own IKEA helmer cluster computer, I immediately saw one great disadvatage to this scaled-up version; how to access the hardware.

Sure you can probably do it and they probably built in the means to get it done, BUT it seems like more work having to open up the protection of 4 mobos just to configure one of them. And if it’s not one on the ends you’re gonna have to take out the one right next to (“on top of”) it.. But they’ll probably be nice to it so they don’t have to:)