[cornboy3]

I am hoping to create a form of super computer called a cluster. Does anybody have any ideas/recommendations. If so, please post below.

Here is an exact definition from wikipedia:

A computer cluster is a group of loosely coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects they can be viewed as though they are a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability.

I am posting this both on Gothic Blood Designs and here:
http://z6.invisionfree.com/G_B_D/index.php?showtopic=83

[Stobbo]

What are you going to use it for?
What is your budget for this system?

This post has been edited by Stobbo: Mar 28 2008, 04:31 PM

[Bob-sama]

Better yet--do you have the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the knowhow to put it together? Clusters can be inexpensive to start--but realize that spending $600 on each machine adds up quickly. I know some schools that use 5-10 Q6600's for rendering work, and have work equally distributed among the 5-10 systems. It's hard to put together and can get expensive fast.

[cornboy3]

What are you going to use it for?
What is your budget for this system?

What are you going to use it for?
Well I don't know yet, probably just about everything. I'm thinking maybe an HD TV recording cluster and each node has a TV Tuner in it

What is your budget for this system?
$0.00

Better yet--do you have the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the knowhow to put it together? Clusters can be inexpensive to start--but realize that spending $600 on each machine adds up quickly. I know some schools that use 5-10 Q6600's for rendering work, and have work equally distributed among the 5-10 systems. It's hard to put together and can get expensive fast.

I've got some old Dell OptiPlex G1s kicking around im only going to make a cluster of 2-5 computers, I've got a switch in my room, and a billion (not literally) 10/100mbps ethernet cards. If I need any extra parts, my dad is an IT manager and a family friend is an IT guy and server manager.

[Stobbo]

It sounds to me that your not really looking into making a cluster of computers forming a super computer, but more a network of computers.

One thing you have to bear in mind is the electric consumption. If you have 5 computers drawing 200 watts each, that 1kwh, 24kwh over 24 hours. Don't know about the price of electric where you live, but where I live it is around $0.25 per kwh. 1kwh over a year is 8760kwh. At $0.25 per kwh, thats $2190 per year your going to be paying on electric.

Can you afford that? Running a cluster of computers is not going to be cheap.

[Acid]

I'm pretty knew to this but wouldn't the concept be 1 workstation with x amount of slaves? the workstation assigning tasks to each slave and spreading the load? For every day use you'd be limited through performance of each slave/workstation? Therefore actually not performing as well as one decent computer?

[Bob-sama]

What are you going to use it for?
What is your budget for this system?

What are you going to use it for?
Well I don't know yet, probably just about everything. I'm thinking maybe an HD TV recording cluster and each node has a TV Tuner in it

What is your budget for this system?
$0.00

Better yet--do you have the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the knowhow to put it together? Clusters can be inexpensive to start--but realize that spending $600 on each machine adds up quickly. I know some schools that use 5-10 Q6600's for rendering work, and have work equally distributed among the 5-10 systems. It's hard to put together and can get expensive fast.

I've got some old Dell OptiPlex G1s kicking around im only going to make a cluster of 2-5 computers, I've got a switch in my room, and a billion (not literally) 10/100mbps ethernet cards. If I need any extra parts, my dad is an IT manager and a family friend is an IT guy and server manager.

Optiplex G1s? Old PII's? You're not going to be able to do very much with those. Not to mention they likely have 10mbit/s ethernet onboard and you should be able to plug in a 100mbit/s PCI card. If you want to record TV, it won't be particularly effective. The problem is that you still need a storage server to actually store all the shows and you need processing power to actually encode the TV shows real-time. To put this simply--it's not cheap and it's not going to be particularly easy to "hack" it all together. They will be no super computer--and it's likely that the TV tuners won't work properly because you're lacking in both RAM and graphics power.

It sounds to me that your not really looking into making a cluster of computers forming a super computer, but more a network of computers.

One thing you have to bear in mind is the electric consumption. If you have 5 computers drawing 200 watts each, that 1kwh, 24kwh over 24 hours. Don't know about the price of electric where you live, but where I live it is around $0.25 per kwh. 1kwh over a year is 8760kwh. At $0.25 per kwh, thats $2190 per year your going to be paying on electric.

Can you afford that? Running a cluster of computers is not going to be cheap.

Those computers probably consume about 100wH each under load--so the price probably won't quite be $2200. If there's any more than about 5 of them running 24/7, it'll be around $1000 a year in power alone.

I'm pretty knew to this but wouldn't the concept be 1 workstation with x amount of slaves? the workstation assigning tasks to each slave and spreading the load? For every day use you'd be limited through performance of each slave/workstation? Therefore actually not performing as well as one decent computer?

Supposedly, it's more about just being a number of computers doing similar tasks, but not depending on any other computer really.


Some other problems--very few routers or switches will actually let you run at full speed. That, and Windows generally limits bandwidth (except for a few multimedia types) to 10% or so of your actual capacity. You can change that in the registry, but it may actually be a bad idea since it's designed to prevent quite a number of problems. If you have a 10/100 switch and are running 10/100 cards, your max bandwidth will probably be 10 mbit/s or about 1.25mbyte/s.

[cornboy3]

One thing you have to bear in mind is the electric consumption. If you have 5 computers drawing 200 watts each, that 1kwh, 24kwh over 24 hours. Don't know about the price of electric where you live, but where I live it is around $0.25 per kwh. 1kwh over a year is 8760kwh. At $0.25 per kwh, thats $2190 per year your going to be paying on electric.

Can you afford that? Running a cluster of computers is not going to be cheap.

Those computers probably consume about 100wH each under load--so the price probably won't quite be $2200. If there's any more than about 5 of them running 24/7, it'll be around $1000 a year in power alone.

Thanks alot for this, my brain hadn't even thought of this. When I was thinking of cost, I wasn't thinking of electricity, I was thinking of parts.

Some other problems--very few routers or switches will actually let you run at full speed. That, and Windows generally limits bandwidth (except for a few multimedia types) to 10% or so of your actual capacity. You can change that in the registry, but it may actually be a bad idea since it's designed to prevent quite a number of problems. If you have a 10/100 switch and are running 10/100 cards, your max bandwidth will probably be 10 mbit/s or about 1.25mbyte/s.

Thanks for this information. Does Ubuntu Linux have the same restrictions?

EDIT: sorry for the late post, I wrote it and then forgot to post it

This post has been edited by cornboy3: Mar 30 2008, 01:32 AM

[Bob-sama]

One thing you have to bear in mind is the electric consumption. If you have 5 computers drawing 200 watts each, that 1kwh, 24kwh over 24 hours. Don't know about the price of electric where you live, but where I live it is around $0.25 per kwh. 1kwh over a year is 8760kwh. At $0.25 per kwh, thats $2190 per year your going to be paying on electric.

Can you afford that? Running a cluster of computers is not going to be cheap.

Those computers probably consume about 100wH each under load--so the price probably won't quite be $2200. If there's any more than about 5 of them running 24/7, it'll be around $1000 a year in power alone.

Thanks alot for this, my brain hadn't even thought of this. When I was thinking of cost, I wasn't thinking of electricity, I was thinking of parts.

Yes--and your parents probably don't want you to be running 5 computers at load. I actually doubt they'll take 100wH each. Pentium II "Deschutes" processors seem to be most common, and are generally 24 watt processors at the most-common 400mhz variation. Counting how many PIIs the my family has around (I have one, my uncle has 3-4 running, about a dozen more as spares), all but one is a PII 400 Deschutes. I was checking and saw that, in their current, state, the systems may very well draw about 180 watts. My estimate was low, Stobbo's was high. The draw probably isn't quite that high--I factored in a 40% aged power supply, 3 sticks of PC133 SD RAM, and some other parts (one CD-ROM drive, floppy, an 80mm fan, TV tuner, PCI NIC).

Ways to save power:
Run without an optical drive
Run without a floppy drive
Run with minimal RAM (1 stick if you're able to)
If you're lucky, it didn't run for a decade strait. Factor in a more-efficient power supply (30% aged instead of 40%)

Doing that specifically, I estimated the power draw to be about 120 watts.

If you're doing any more than four systems with more than that above minimum like this, it'll be much better, efficient, and easy to spend the money on a newer computer. A TV tuner card that will read digital feeds will cost you about $50. My quick estimate parts list... Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2160 ($75), Intel P35 motherboard with 6 SATA connections and RAID support ($100), 2x2GB RAM ($70), SATA DVD burner w/ Lightscribe ($35), four 250GB hard drives ($240), one 160GB OS hard drive ($50), 500W power supply ($60), three TV tuner cards ($150), WinXP Media Center 2005 or WinVista Home Premium ($120), a Radeon HD2600 Pro ($70), and an ATX case ($50). Cost estimate for that? About $1080 shipped and a cost of 450 watt-Hours. It'll be a bit more expensive up-front but it'll be even in the long run. You eliminate the hassles of networking, compatibility, reliability, and basically everything else you'll encounter using old systems. You'll also have several times more processing power and storage.

I would personally not advise it--I basically compiled three computers into one system. You could get away with a bit less (dual TV tuners and 2 fewer hard drives, for example). It's expensive and probably not worth it--and why not just get a DVD recorder and use DVD-RAM discs? They have a 4.7GB capacity each and hundreds of thousands of rewrites. They'll cost less too--$120-$180 a recorder, though you'll have to manually get the DVD-RAM disc. Life is all about compromises--and if you go with the DVD recorder instead of a DVR computer, you'll save significantly. You can use numerous types of DVD to record the shows and whatever you want to watch, so it is also flexible. Your only real problem comes in copying the DVDs--as making a copy consumes money.

Some other problems--very few routers or switches will actually let you run at full speed. That, and Windows generally limits bandwidth (except for a few multimedia types) to 10% or so of your actual capacity. You can change that in the registry, but it may actually be a bad idea since it's designed to prevent quite a number of problems. If you have a 10/100 switch and are running 10/100 cards, your max bandwidth will probably be 10 mbit/s or about 1.25mbyte/s.

Thanks for this information. Does Ubuntu Linux have the same restrictions?

EDIT: sorry for the late post, I wrote it and then forgot to post it

Good luck getting drivers for Ubuntu! The community is nowhere near large enough to write all the drivers--so you'll likely have to find out what specific TV tuners have drivers and use only those. I was running Ubuntu 5.10 on a PIII 600mhz laptop with 128MB RAM and I was almost always at 98% used RAM--even Ubuntu gets quite heavy on RAM. You'll probably need a minimum of 256MB of RAM to get a TV tuner running properly.

This post has been edited by Bob-sama: Mar 30 2008, 10:33 AM

[man]

http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/

You might want to read up on this cluster. It is relatively affordable and the whole thing only uses 450 watts under load (not bad at all for four CPUs). Though it's kinda outdated now (a year or so old), it might give you an idea of how to go about this better.

Like Bob said, a new dual core computer would be a faster and more efficient option.

[Bob-sama]

Let's put it this way--one Celeron 420 processor (single-core Conroe-L running at 1.6GHz) will consume about twice as much as a single Pentium II 400MHz processor and will perform over four times better in SSE and MMX tasks.

What's SSE and MMX? In short, they're instruction sets. The Celeron 420 has the added advantage of SSE2 and SSE3 support. It also supports 64-bit operating systems and applications. Using those higher instruction sets, you will get MUCH better performance with that single slow single-core processor (about equivalent to a 3.2GHz Pentium 4), versus even 10 Pentium II 400 processors, especially after factoring in limited bandwidth.

As I said, using DVD recorders and DVD-RAM discs, you'll have a much more budget-efficient and power-efficient alternative to using a cluster of old computers. I'm not saying that old computers are worthless or useless or inefficient--because quite frankly that's not the case. My uncle runs three or four PII 400s as his primary desktop, vinyl digital recording station, and backup desktop. As he says--if the site requires Flash, I don't need to be there. The difference with this is the task is too demanding for the particular system. Using a number of computers older than 8 years (two lifetimes for most systems) for a task like recording TV will work, but it won't be particularly efficient.

[cornboy3]

Ok, thanks a ton for the input. I'm thinking now I might reconsider and just make one really good computer rather than piecing together old ones, mainly because it would be more cost effective. As I said before, thanks for all the information and the input. I can't wait to what I will do .

[Acid]

Heck whatever you decide to do keep us posted its always fun to hear about peoples little tech projects.

[Bob-sama]

Ok, thanks a ton for the input. I'm thinking now I might reconsider and just make one really good computer rather than piecing together old ones, mainly because it would be more cost effective. As I said before, thanks for all the information and the input. I can't wait to what I will do .

I have to remind myself of most of my own points, quite often. So yes--it'll be much more budget efficient to make your own all-in-one multimedia system. Depending on what you want and what you need, prices can vary. A lot of options for many different things...

Single core v. Dual core v. Quad core
Low-end card with HDMI or mid-range card with HDMI and acceleration
AMD's socket AM2 v. Intel's socket LGA775
2x1GB RAM v. 1x2GB RAM v. 2x2GB RAM
Non-RAID v. RAID 0 v. RAID 1 v. RAID 5 v. RAID 10 v. Intel Matrix RAID v. JBOD
WinXP MCE v. WinVista HP v. WinVista Ultimate v. Linux
DVD Burner without Blu-Ray v. Blu-Ray Reader v. Blu-Ray Burner
Sound card v. Integrated sound v. S/PDIF Optical v. S/PDIF Coaxial

That's just the start of it, really. There's a lot to consider if you want to build it like that.

I'll be happy to help with any advice--there's a lot to consider. I'd also be happy to hear about projects like this.

Good luck.

[cornboy3]

Thanks for all the help but the more I think about it, the more it sounds expensive.

-Cornboy3

[Mikey]

Thanks for all the help but the more I think about it, the more it sounds expensive.

-Cornboy3

Did you think it would be cheap to begin with?

[cornboy3]

...maybe I did, maybe I didn't...

This post has been edited by cornboy3: Mar 30 2008, 09:43 PM

[Bob-sama]

...maybe I did, maybe I didn't...

Let's put it this way... the most expensive hardware components will be hard drives. I'd say spend $80 on a mATX Intel G965 chipset motherboard, $75 on an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2160, $40 on 2GB of RAM, $80 on a Radeon HD3650, and then as much as you want for hard drives. Be aware that you CAN jury-rig a solution to hold extra hard drives, but I wouldn't suggest it unless you know what you're doing. I'd say go with a 3-drive RAID 5, for the data security. You just need to make sure you get a chipset with RAID (ICH7R--look at 975X, G31, P31, and ICH8R--look at G965 and P965, ICH9R--look at G33, G35, and P35). You could get a PCI or PCI Express RAID controller, but those aren't worth it if you can get one onboard, at least for a task like this.

My real question is exactly what do you want to use this system for? What type of monitor and speakers are you setting up? If you're not independent, I doubt it'll be much and so basic parts can be used.

[cornboy3]

WelI think what I want to get is:
Intel Core 2 Duo Quad core
1x 2 Gig stick of ram
No idea what motherboard
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate
Current drives will stay the same
XCLIO A380BK Case
Either 1 DVI port and one VGA or two DVI

Needs to have:
At least 1 PCI Slot for my TV tuner
DVI out
S-Video out

[Acid]

WelI think what I want to get is:
Intel Core 2 Duo Quad core
1x 2 Gig stick of ram
No idea what motherboard
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate
Current drives will stay the same
XCLIO A380BK Case
Either 1 DVI port and one VGA or two DVI

Needs to have:
At least 1 PCI Slot for my TV tuner
DVI out
S-Video out

If you find an Intel Core 2 Duo Quad core let us know .

Ok if you want some help on the parts we'll need to know the following;

-Whats your budget?
-What do you need the computer for? - Heavy multitasking, Video Editing, Gaming, All of the above?

Apart from the above obviously