Quote:
Instar said:
If you could tell me how you built that, I would like totally buy you a burrito next time I see you in person.
I've heard of RAM disks, but never actually ever used them. It is RAM that is mounted as a hard drive, right?
Also, I assume they're communicating over the network to do work, right? or did you hook them up in some other way?
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Ram disks can be software and use set aside blocks of system ram, or they can be hardware based. The ones I used were just little plastic things that plugged into the IDE cables. Originally they had Disk images on them used for testing new PC�s that were being shipped without software. Not sure what kind of ram is actually in them, but they work like a small very fast hard drive.
The connection between the boards is gigabit ethernet. Windows used just plain old tcp/ip, with nix it used UDP. Master board has a quad port LAN card in addition to the onboard connection.
To get started, I just searched Linux clusters and dl�d the directions for building it. But like I said, it was never fully reliable as a Nix cluster. As a windows cluster, it just ran like five systems that shared one raid array. I had to cut everything out of the OS install that was not needed in order to make it fit on the ram drive, then I just ghost cast the end product to the ram drives.
For the bios hacking, I will have to try and find the guys email addy for you. I just looked in some OCing forums where they talked about custom bios files and then started asking if anyone could set a file up to do what I wanted. After some wasted time, I got pointed to this guy who had built some seti stacks and then he knew another person that had a custom file for a biostar board. And so forth and so on. Then one thing led to another and with about $1000 bucks worth of chips and boards and some ram plus an arm full of stuff I had sitting around, and a few parts begged and barrowed, I put it together. Then I bounced between bliss and pulling my hair out for a couple of months. The problem seemed to be that the system clock generators hertz changed with temp. The hotter boards in the center seemed to fall behind and then. I kept messing with it until I had to give the quad network card back to it rightful owner. After that I just ran windows