DC Farm

[excaliber]

Got some questions. Over the summer, I want to build myself a farm. I've read about it, and have a general working knowledge. But got a few questions.

First, any recomendations on boards? I want a cheap (and I mean very cheap) machine. Heres what I have in mind:

http://www.tufshop.com/store/product818.html

That package comes out to $65. It includes Mobo, Athlon XP 2000, generic HSF. The mobo has onboard LAN. Im going to purchase some cheapo Kingston 128Mb PC2100 RAM (http://www.ec.kingston.com/shop/PartsInfo.asp?ktcpartno=KVR266X64C2/128) as well.

I'm also going to pick up a cheap ($13) 8-port switch (http://www.pcimicro.com/.sc/ms/dd/1062739817297062/9/nc/Network%2520-%2520Hub--Generic/929/Link-Max%2520LM-208%25208%2520Port%2520Switch%2520Retail%2520BoxHttp://www.pcimicro.com) and a bunch of cabling.

So, I'm getting 1.67 Ghz of computing power for $98 per blade. I figure I can get 4 blades right now. And at that price, I can continue to add more blades often.

Any comments?

[tim]

Right on! Have a ball! :D

Don't know anything about the syntax board. Are you planning to net boot, and if so does that bios/onboard lan support net boot? Or will you boot from a floppy or cdrom or harddrive?

I'm partial to floppy boot, since that's what I got started with. But there are better ways to do it, I'm sure.

How were you going to mount the 4 boards? Here's a fun link to give you some ideas: http://bhs.broo.k12.wv.us/homepage/staff/seti/farms.htm One of these days I need to get a digital camera and post pics of how I've got mine arranged.

[PCZ]

excaliber

The board you have in mind looks OK
The VIA integrated nic {VIA Rhine} is supported by the LTSP kernel so PXE booting will be easy.

Be aware though that you will have to use Athlons intended for 133mhz buses.
No problem while you can still get them !!

Another thing to be aware of is they have no onboard video so you may have to buy some cheap video cards.

You don't need video cards in linux netboot nodes but quite often the BIOS won't
let the board boot without a video card.
There are bios editing tools that can get round this but it is tricky.{Easy on AMI bios}

Also I think you intend to install 128mb on each board.
You should consider increasing this to 256mb.
DF can use more than 128mb with the larger proteins.

Note:
DF can be run without the rt switch to conserve memory but it is much slower.

You might also want to run a secondary project like chessbrain on the nodes
with 128mb this would be difficult.

[MerePeer]

Great combo price! Hope you'll apply some cycles to DF when it's ready!

Haven't burned it in enough to say it will last, but here's the cheapee board I recently got for $55, has onboard lan and video and more usb ports:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-152-030&depa=0

Unfortunately combining that with a $58 2000+ (box incl fan) @newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-383&depa=1

...would put you at $113 each for the same net gigahertz.


I noticed none of those stacks have KVM switches -- how do they use a keyboard and mouse? "plug it in if manually I ever need to"?

[excaliber]

Hey all. THanks for the comments. I'm looking to the no videocard problem. I'm going to run them all headless, netboot (floppy if i cant get netboot to work), without KVM switches.

MerePere: I'll check out that package when I get home.

PCZ: Im not sure about memory. I would like to get some more, but that adds a fair amount to the cost. Dunno, may/may not get it.

More later, gotta go. School calls.

[matrix_fan]

"think" NewEgg Refurbed mobo's. I got mine for $23 with onboard everything.

[Bionic_Redneck]

excaliber,
The biostar m7vigpd is very well suited for this appication w/ onboard everything. probly a good idea to have some kind of video for debugging purposes. My farm consists of epox 8kha+ running gentoo and ltsp 4 as server and 4 m7vig proD's mounted in a homemade rack which is made to house 10 workstations. It's best to use matx or flex form factors.

[MerePeer]

So I'm wondering...in a general sense...I was surprised by the "no keyboard" reply...assuming folks get a board to net boot under Linux, do you then run some software that lets you remotely admin it? For instance in Windows that might be an RDP-based terminal server. In unix I was just searching and found this app called VNC -- is that what folks use?

http://www.realvnc.com/why.html


@PCZ: how do you know/determine if a motherboard will net boot? I'm seriously considering an ASUS A7N8X-VM (not sure what VM means).
http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-VM&langs=01

Also -- as a Linux-wannabe I'm wondering if I need to confirm that there are Linux drivers when buying a motherboard? If so, are those drivers specific to which flavor Linux O/S I choose, SuSe, Mandrake, Redhat, etc?

TIA.
:)

[excaliber]

Theres a great deal on a Gigabyte refurb (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-128-173R&type=Refurbish) for only $35. Thinking about that. Has onboard everything as well.

As to remote administration, I use TightVNC. Its cross platform (although runs smoother for Unix, as the platform was originally geared towards this type of thing).

As too netboot, I'm not sure. I think you need a PXE compliant network card. I'm still kinda hazy on the details. Then you need a tFTP server running on your 'server' blade to grab the boot image from. Thats about as far as I know.

[tim]

I administer my Linux boxes with telnet. Insecure yes, but I'm behind a reasonably secure firewall. And you can do it from a windows box with Putty.

I don't know much about netboot either, I should take the time to learn. For now, I have the linux kernel and the basics on a 1680k formatted floppy, including the dhcp stuff each box needs to interact with my router/dhcp server. Once I understood the principles involved, it's almost as easy as windows networking (plug it in and go).

[Bionic_Redneck]

If you plan on using ltsp in the lts.conf you can specify what which rc files to run for each workstation or just have one default one and then write the script to start your dc client. Say if I wanted ws001 to run folding@home I put in RCFILE_01= fah and when I start ws001 it runs fah automaticly and /home is exported to nfs partition. so what exactly would you adminster from the workstation?

MerePeer, Linux is just the kernel and where most of the drivers come from each distro has little to do with that at worst case you would have to recompile kernel from my experiences k12ltsp is the easiest to get going for diskless booting and is fedora core 1 with ltsp installed and here is the but the distro is terrible I would recommend SUse or mandrake both have just released new versions resently. you could do like I did install k12ltsp on second hdd and any ltsp related stuff like pxe could be copied over to your real distro

[QIbHom]

MerePeer, you might want to take a look at Webmin, if you haven't administered Linux boxes before. Makes things easy, and it is more secure than telnet (what isn't?).

[Bionic_Redneck]

Originally posted by excaliber
Theres a great deal on a Gigabyte refurb (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-128-173R&type=Refurbish) for only $35. Thinking about that. Has onboard everything as well.

As to remote administration, I use TightVNC. Its cross platform (although runs smoother for Unix, as the platform was originally geared towards this type of thing).

As too netboot, I'm not sure. I think you need a PXE compliant network card. I'm still kinda hazy on the details. Then you need a tFTP server running on your 'server' blade to grab the boot image from. Thats about as far as I know.
I'm not going to say all motherboards that come with onboard lan are pxe bootable but a lot are it's usually a couple of setting in bios you need to enable 1 is to boot off network and the other is to enable bootrom. you need some type of HDD cooling for sure. My hdd's weren't glow yet but they were hot enough where it wouldn't burn you but would be painful if touched with a sensitive area of hand.