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Mini-ITX Clustering
NormalVisual writes "Add this cluster to the list of fun stuff you can do with those tiny little Mini-ITX motherboards. I especially like the bit about the peak 200W power dissipation. Look Ma, no fans!! You may now begin with the obligatory Beowulf comments...."
We studied 3 mini beowulf systems a while back, here at University of Central Florida, one of which was a mini-ITX beowulf. Here's some info and preliminary results: http://helios.engr.ucf.edu/beowulf/miniature.phtml
They might be on their way. Here's a 1.7 GHz Pentium M.
It's all Hood
I built a Mini-ITX based massively parallel cluster named PROTEUS. I have 12 nodes using VIA EPIA V8000, 800 MHz motherboards. The little machine is running FreeBSD 4.8, and MPICH 1.2.5.2. Troubles installing and configuring Free BSD and MPICH were few. In fact, there were no major issues with either FreeBSD or MPICH.
/usr on the controlling node via NFS, for storage and to allow for a very simple configuration. No official benchmarks have been run, but for simple computational tasks the mini cluster appears to be faster than four 2.4 GHz pentium 4 mcahines used in parallel, at a fraction of the cost and power use.
The construction is simple and inexpensive. The motherboards were stacked using threaded aluminum standoffs and then mounted on aluminum plates. Two stacks of three motherboards were assembled into each rack. Diagonal stiffeners were fabricated from aluminum angle stock to reduce flexing of the rack assembly.
The controlling node has a 160 GB ATA-133 HDD, and the computational nodes use 340 MB IBM microdrives in compact flash to IDE adapters. For file I/O, the computational nodes mount a partition on the controlling node's hard drive by means of a network file system mount point.
Each motherboard is powered by a Morex DC-DC converter, and the entire cluster is powered by a rather large 12V DC switching power supply.
With the exception of the metalwork, power wiring, and power/reset switching, everything is off the shelf.
At present, the idle power consumption is about 140 Watts (for 12 nodes) with peaks estimated at around 200 Watts. The machine runs cool and quiet. The controlling node has 256 MB RAM , and an 160 GB ATA 133 IDE hard disk drive. The computational nodes have 256 MB RAM, each and boot from 340 MB IBM microdrives by means of compact flash to IDE adapters. The computational nodes mount
Power and Cooling
Mini-ITX boards have very low power dissipation as compared to most motherboard/cpu combination in popular use today. This means that a Mini-ITX cluster with as many as 16 nodes won't need special air conditioning. Low power dissipation also means low power use, so you can use a single inexpensive UPS to provide clean AC power for the nodes.
In contrast, a 12-16 node cluster built with Intel or AMD processors will generate enough heat that you will likely need heavy duty air conditioning. Additionally, you will need adequate electrical power to deliver the 2-3 kilowatts peak load that your 12 node PC cluster will require. Plan on having higher than average utility bills if you use PC's...
Hardware Construction
The cluster is built in two nearly identical racks. Each rack has two stacks of three motherboards and dc-dc converters mounted on aluminum standoffs.
The compact flash adapters used to mount the microdrives are also in stacks of three. Each stack of boards is mounted on a 7 inch by 10 inch 0.0625 thick 6061-T6 aluminum plate as are the microdrive stacks. There are seven metal plates in all, in each rack.
The top cover plate has the mounting bracket for the 6 on/off/reset switches.
The plate below it is home to the power distribution terminal block. The power delivery cable for each rack is heavy duty 14 gauge stranded wire with pvc insulation. The power cabling from the terminal strip to each of the dc-dc converters is 18 gauge stranded pvc insulated hookup wire. The wiring for the power/reset switches is 24 gauge stranded, pvc insulated wire.
The top rack houses nodes one through six (node one is the controlling node). The bottom plate of the top rack also houses the 160 GB ATA-133 hard disk drive used by the controlling node. All other nodes make use of the IBM microdrives. Node number three has a spare compact flash adapter which can be used to duplicate microdrives for easy node maintenance.
The disk drive and power cabling to the motherboards was dressed as was sanely possible on the back panel. The liberal use of nylon cable ties helps reduce the ten
There are P4 Mini-ITX systems available: Pentium 4
But, most mini-itx systems are very small in size, and strive for quiet or silent operation. So, there are obvious problems with the P4's heat/power requirements. Perhaps a better solution is the Pentium-M in a mini-itx form factor. It has pretty good performance, at a low power/heat level: Pentium M. But, most of the Pentium-M boards are intended for industrial or OEM use, so they are hard to find in retail, and are pretty expensive.
sheesh that didn't take long.
l m l m l
I managed to get it mirrored here:
page 1:
http://www.phule.net/mirrors/mini-itx-cluster.htm
page 2:
http://www.phule.net/mirrors/mini-itx-cluster2.ht
page 3:
http://www.phule.net/mirrors/mini-itx-cluster3.ht
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Oh, I forgot: each of these boxes contains a 2,8GHz P4 Northwood CPU (200/800MHz FSB), 1GB RAM. The Shuttle barebone used is the S75G2 and one of the reasons we chose it was that it has an on-board gigabit ethernet adapter. The CPU cooler that came with it is also very interesting - it uses a rather unique design with a heatpipe ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
How about Fujitsu's mini-tx form factor for the Pentium M proc. Runs passive (huge heatsink, but passive nonetheless) and uses less electrons.
Coudn;t find a link though, sorry.
Yes, I guess that most current BIOSes of the newer boards do, especially the consumer-ish stuff. We just used the stock Shuttle XPC with its FlexATX-board.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The floating point is just a convenience. Almost any algorithm can be modified to work with fixed point precision -- and without loss of performance.
Of course, many people will insist, they need FP to be able count dollars and cents -- they don't even think of counting cents (or any other fractions of the dollar) with integers, for example.
These are, usually, the same people, who have troubles defining bit...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There are no dual boards for normal P4s since they can't runt in SMP mode. You have to buy Xeons and they arn't exactely cheap. Dual AMD Athlons (the MP model or a modded XP) are your only option for a cheap dual desktop.
I can't wait for the new, smaller nano-itx boards to come out. 4.5" on a side, 1GHZ CPU and draws 7 watts. I got an email from VIA claiming they will be released in April.
MB, slim DVD and laptop HD in a case the size of a large paperback book!
It will make my "K-Mart Toolbox Mini-ITX PVR" look like a full tower in comparison!
Six times as much as what? My entire mini-itx system was under $500, and most of the cost of that was a solid-state drive large enough for a decent linux distribution... and most of the rest was a touch-screen monitor.
I've had this sig for three days.
A beowolf of mini-itx boards is probably the cheapest way to get bragging rights. As a practical way of fast and cheap parallel computation they are not.
However, I have purchased three (V10000 boards) thus far and intend to add more to my network as low power (as in Watts) servers.
I worked out that given the power of 10.78W (source: mini-itx.com's power comparison tool) for the V series (probably the one with the slowest CPU in the series, board only), I could save a fortune on electricity compared to a more regular computer.
The electricity company sells electricity at the rate of 0.63 ($1.18) per watt per year. Compared with a standard PC of 100W, I can regain the purchase costs (in savings) of the board and memory within two to three years.
Also, I found rack mount chassis available cheaper than one for a regular sized case. This influenced my decision a little - who doesn't want a network of rack mounted computers?
Overall, because of the low price and low power the mini-itx boards are a no brainer if and only if the CPU power of each computer isn't important.
Jonathan
There are Pentium-M boards.
I'm not aware of any Athlon-based boards, but mostly because I'm satisfied with my Via-based M10000 board.
Here is a Pentium M powered Mini-ITX board.
It's all Hood
The answer to this is...
Yes! (2) and Yes! (4)
The original links went to NASA/GSFC, but the Beowulf project central site has moved.
What characteristics do you want? There are two major types of solid state drives -- battery-backed ram, and flash ram. Both are expensive and small. Only one is fast.
My requirements were essentially (1) no moving parts, (2) affordable if not cheap, and (3) small. I settles on one of these. Debian is fine on 128MB, with 512MB of ram and no swap. Performance, it should be said, sucks. The next step up, for slightly more performance, much more capacity, and a whole lot more cost, is here; but I wanted to avoid using a case that needed drive bays, plus I haven't pockets that deep.
Neither of those is likely to be what you want for a database system, though. You're probably more in the market for a bunch of ram and a battery, unless your primary concern is reliability. If speed is the goal, you want this, or, for more capacity and more money, this. Note that I haven't used either extensively, and in playing around with the rocket a little, I was surprised just how much of a bottleneck PCI became. Also, the rocket doesn't have a battery... so really, unless you have a board with 8GB of memory, and you just need another 8GB of low latency space, it's not such a great deal today.
If you fit into any of the niches above, solid state is wonderful. It's always more expensive than you think, though. And for any database systems I've dealt with, a disk is without question the way to go, perhaps with more memory on board. But if you want any further tips, I'm glad to help.
I've had this sig for three days.
He used the VIA EPIA V8000A motherboard with an Eden core CPU. From what I found on google (here), the Eden core does run the FPU at full clock speed.
I have the VIA EPIA 8000 (not sure what the V and A modifiers mean), with an Ezra core. FYI, Eden isn't a core, it's an initiative. The VIA Eden is aka VIA EPIA 5000, and was the first fanless Mini-ITX. Eden was the development product moniker, and came to refer to the motherboard that was first produced from that initiative. It can also refer to any C3 CPU made to run fanless.
Back onto the original topic; my EPIA 8000 with an Ezra core runs the FPU at half clock. This document on the differences between the Ezra/Ezra-T and Nehemiah cores indicates that one of the fundamental differences between the two is the full speed FPU. So I doubt that the article you quoted is accurate...
Just some more info... Nehemiah was manufactured at 933 MHz, 1 GHz, and speeds up to 2 GHz are planned. The Ezra was manufactured at 533 MHz and 800 MHz in its first run; the 533 is also known as the Eden. The Ezra-T (the second run of the Ezra) was made at 600 MHz (aka Eden), 800 MHz, 933 MHz, and 1 GHz.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Video encoding? (Now, where'd I put that parallel-processing version of AVISynth?)
dyne:bolic is a Live CD distribution, very small, that can be PXE boot, with full audio/video capture/editing/processing/streaming capabilities plus the usual suite of tools, a few games and whatnot... and is auto-clustering on a private network.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
:)
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!
To him an heir was afterward born,
a son in his halls, whom heaven sent
to favor the folk, feeling their woe
that erst they had lacked an earl for leader
so long a while; the Lord endowed him,
the Wielder of Wonder, with world's renown.
Famed was this Beowulf
Sample from the Project Gutenberg Text of Beowulf.
Why not do yourself a favour and download it. Classic stuff.
siggy played guitar