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Advice wanted for setting up a farm

8/18/2006 2:43:06 AM

fesstess

653 posts

Website

Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(United States)

Looking to setup 4 or 5 blades and need whatever advice you all can give me on diagrams, racks, networking, do's and don'ts.

Any and all advice is much appreciated.

8/18/2006 4:48:19 AM

Xaak

1056 posts

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(United States)

The first thing you need to decide is to go cases or caseless. Caseless is cheaper, but there are some decent cheap cases out there.

If you do go caseless, it's a good idea to mount the motherboard, power supply and hard drive onto a piece of plywood or something, but you can just sit everything on a flat surface. When I ran bare blades, I used velcro to mount the PS and I used those 3.5 - 5.25" HD mounting rails and screwed them down to the board, and put a couple of small wood screws with spacers to mount the mobo to the plywood.

Get yourself an external USB CD rom drive or DVD drive, or buy an enclosure and use an existing drive. The way it's easy to load whatever software you might need. An external floppy is also useful, or you can use a bootable (to dos or some variant) USB thumb drive for doing things like bios updates.

I've moved everything to cases now, and have a rolling Metro rack (wire shelf unit) to keep the monitor, KVM box, and networking gear on.

At miniumum, you'll need a network switch (if you don't already have one with enough open ports), 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, and 1 monitor. You can swap the mouse, keyboard and monitor around as needed, though you'll only really need that for boot time stuff. You can use VNC or remote desktop to manage the boxes once the OS is installed and the machine is booted. If you want real convenience, you can get a KVM switch so you can just press a button or a hotkey to switch the monitor, keyboard and mouse between boxes. 4 port and 8 port KVMs can get pricey though.

Also optional, but very important imho is a UPS. I've had great luck buying refirb units from a local place (they ship nationwide). http://www.refurbups.com For 4 pentium D class machines you'll need something like a 1250 or 1500 VA unit to be safe. Having a dedicated 15 or 20 amp circuit isn't a bad idea, but it's not necessary if you're on a lightly used breaker.

If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

HTH

Gary
You can't fix dead.

8/18/2006 5:51:00 AM

Matrix

222 posts

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(United States)

Setting up a farm is a lot of work. First you need lots of land and then you need to have a barn and fencing...

Oh, wrong kind of farm.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin

8/18/2006 7:59:24 AM

fesstess

653 posts

Website

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(Canada)

Matrix wrote

Setting up a farm is a lot of work. First you need lots of land and then you need to have a barn and fencing...

Oh, wrong kind of farm.

I've already got that kind of farm with 2 horses,barn, fenced pasture.

8/19/2006 2:50:29 AM

fesstess

653 posts

Website

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(United States)

Thanks Xaak that'll give me a good start. thinking of going caseless on a rack like Kinguni has in the cruncher pics on the "other" site.

8/19/2006 5:40:39 AM

Crazee

224 posts

Website

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(N/A)

Back in the day before it was fashionable (yes before crunchenstein and even the OcUK rack) I made the Crazee Crack Rack. I started with 4 blades and eventually it made it to 10 blades of Athlon XPs. I went caseless as I really didn't see much need for the case. I put everything on some shelves with velcro to secure things down. The shelves were wide enough to allow for 3 blades and their power supplies to lay across and there were 5 rows of shelves. With the 3com 16 port network switch (bought used on Anandtech FS/FT forum) taking some room I had space for about 14 blades if I wanted to go to that many. I bought a bunch of old hard drives (again from the AT FS/FT forum) 8GB - 20GB for cheap. I loaded the blades up with Windows 2000 because I had a bunch of OEM copies from my job (I worked for a system manufacturer at the time) and put Seti and VNC on each. I eventually got a UPS because I learned the hard way a few times that one should always run computer equipment on a UPS. I used a USB keyboard and mouse to move them from blade to blade as needed.

I didn't use an external CD-ROM Drive, I just hooked up an internal to load the software and when it was done, I shutdown the blade, removed the CD-ROM and powered the blade back up. Of course back then an external CD-ROM was a lot more expensive so you may find that it fits your budget now. Also, Seti classic crunched much better with Windows than with Linux. I considered doing a single master node with Linux that had a decent hard drive and the rest of the blades would boot from the network and use the master node's hard drive, however the drop in production from using Linux would have severly impacted the results and for the cost of the drives it was not worth it. However now with BOINC I don't know if that is still the case. You may want to consider looking into it because less parts means less power and less failure to have to keep up with.

A very important thing to look at is the motherboard. I went with boards that were compact with the video built in. If I could have found boards that would boot without video I would have gotten those and only used the video card when loading the blade. I also wanted boards that could overclock fairly easily but I never wanted to really try to run them as high as they could go for fear that it would increase the frequency I would have to tend to them. In determining what processor to go with, I would take what it would cost to build a blade for each proc I was considering and divide the results that blade should bring to get a cost/WU. The one with the best ratio was the one I built. There were some people who I know that got some power supplies that would run two boards, however that was before the advent of power supplies that had multiple types of connectors for the motherboards, so I don't know if such a beast still exists. It could save you some money on power if it does though so you might want to look into it.

Like Xaak said, a lightly used or dedicated breaker is important. Do not try to start all your blades at once either; always stagger start them. I found a UPS to be pretty essential to prevent the lose of hardware in a storm and to minimize my having to start blades back up in the event of a short power outage.

8/22/2006 2:55:57 AM

fesstess

653 posts

Website

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(United States)

Thanks Crazee, from what information i've been able to find, UPS are only good for 1/2 hour or maybe a little more. If i'm at work at the time of a power outage the equipment will probably shut down before I could get home. I noticed in a local flyer yesterday a store had an inverter that can be connected to a 12v car battery, this and a UPS combined may keep the blades operating longer. I can somtimes have power out for many hours. I've been looking to get a generator anyway to keep my pressure system ( water and septic) pumping during power outage.

9/13/2006 12:49:56 AM

322 posts

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(United States) Modified By DT on 9/13/2006 2:59:48 AM)

hope these give ya some ideas on building a farm :)

ups are good for keeping electricity stable and for short outages like minutes not hours i allmost forgot its good to protect your expensive ups with a cheap surge supressor too!

9/13/2006 2:58:19 AM

322 posts

Re: Advice wanted for setting up a farm
(United States)

some new pics

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