SEV Betatest...

[Thermodyne]

Instar said:

OMG! Very nice... but you need to build an enclosure for it... if only to shield the EM radiation from it

And full speed of 13Ghz, it put out as much heat as a blow torch, could hardly keep it cool sitting in the open. In the old alfa case I was using, CPU temps would hit throttle stops in less than an hour at full load.

[Instar]

!
That's astounding Thermodyne... how did you build it and how much does it cost? I want one...
How is it set up, is it a Beowolf cluster or something? It looks like some kind of supercomputer array.

[Thermodyne]

It's a....well a it's.....a...Damn if I really know.
Its a $1000 quad processor I guess. 1st board is the master, and the other four are slaved to it. As programmed, it took folding@home work units apart and split the work between the four slaves. When it was synced, it returned results at a rate of more than 4 times the speed of the master working alone. Slaves are ram drive systems with 512mrg drives and 64megs of system memory. Master has 128 megs of ram and a 100gig raid 5 ide array. All cpu's are XP3000-266's. Main boards are VIA 400 chipset biostar's ($32 each) with hacked bios flashes. All ran nix. Never could get it to stay in sync for more than about 18 hours. Ended up running it as 5 2K blade servers in a cluster with good results. But it cost about $10 a day to run, so I lost interest at about 40K worth of units.

[Instar]

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?

[Thermodyne]

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?

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

[se5a]

d000d that is soooo sweet.
I might try that some day (yea right, like I will ever get around to it)
so water cooling might be a good idea then? or maybe build it in a mini frezer

[Makinus]

Thermodyne, your comp is dream of any computer tinkerer...

I had a long time ago a monster computer that i build using several old boards and processors, if i remember well it was 3 486-66mhz and 2 Pentium 133 with every board networked with the others and a stripped down version of Win95 in every HD (they ranged from 500mb up to 2gb in one of the pentiums)... my idea was to create a gaming network to play DukeNuken3D and other games, and i plugged monitors and keyboards in every ne of them.... i and me fried gave it the name of "Frankie" because it was a whole mess of cables, boards and eletrical discharges... i lost it to an eletrical surge that fried the majority of the boards...

Your machine looks like a big brother of my old "Frankie", minus the monitors and keyboards...

hummm, lets see what bits and pieces i have around here to see if i can build something.....

[Puke]

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.

Ram disks are portions of your RAM that are set aside as virtual HDD space. what you are describing sounds like a FLASH disk, which would be non-volotile and orders of magnitude slower.

RAM disks are more or less obsolete due to modern memory management practices. it used to be that you could make things run uber-fast by putting the program on a RAM disk instead of your hard drive, and taking advantage of the higher speed of the memory and of the faster bus that the SIMM / DIMM banks were on.

These days, computers have such stupidly large quantities of memory, and OS memory management routines are so advanced, you will generally be slowing yourself down by second-guessing your system and trying to force software to run on a ram disk.

There are, however, solid state FLASH based hard disks with no moving parts in them. these are crazy fast, and models exist for both SCSI-3, Fibrechannel, and IDE. now if you just had a massive SAN filled with them...