Typical hardware

[Shane Canon]

Dean,

I would nix the CD-ROM drives unless there is some real need
for it (beowulf mp3 ripper).

Don't forget some type of serial console and real estate for it.

I haven't seen a case designed to accommodate two motherboards.
Is this a commercial product?  Or are you doing a back and
front side arrangement?

--Shane Canon


Dean.Carpenter at pharma.com said:
> We, like most out there I'm sure, are constrained, by money and by
> space. We need to get lots of cpus in as small a space as possible.
> Lots of 1U VA-Linux or SGI boxes would be very cool, but would drain
> the coffers way too quickly.  Generic motherboards in clone cases is
> cheap, but takes up too much room.

> So, a colleague and I are working on a cheap and high-density 1U node.
>  So far it looks like we'll be able to get two dual-CPU (P3)
> motherboards per 1U chassis, with associated dual-10/100, floppy, CD
> and one hard drive.  And one PCI slot.  Although it would be nice to
> have several Ultra160 scsi drives in raid, a generic cluster node (for
> our uses) will work fine with a single large UDMA-100 ide drive.

> That's 240 cpus per 60U rack.  We're still working on condensed power
> for the rack, to simplify things.  Note that I said "for our uses"
> above.  Our design goals here are density and $$$.  Hence some of the
> niceties are being foresworn - things like hot-swap U160 scsi raid
> drives, das blinken lights up front, etc.

> So, what do you think ?  If there's interest, I'll keep you posted on
> our progress.  If there's LOTS of interest, we may make a larger
> production run to make these available to others.

> -- Dean Carpenter deano at areyes.com dean.carpenter at pharma.com
> dean.carpenter at purduepharma.com 94TT :)


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