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<div>Heya guys,</div><div><br></div><div>Well my Beowulf is still building with 6 nodes and a master sever containing a total of 56 2.10Ghz AMD 2373EE cores (dual socket, quad cores) nd while I'm working this up to around 12 nodes and a master creating a total of 218.4Ghz CPU.</div><div><br></div><div>I've ran into a right issue, I wanted to apply some GPU hardware, just as a little boost using the old GTX570 PCI-E x16 spare slot within each node, sadly this have given me some serious heartburn.. And I already knew the card itself would not even entertain being seated with a 1U node, but the use of an PCI-E ribbon extenders might have solved the issue..</div><div><br></div><div>Even more sadly, haha and even with the motherboard being able to accept version 3.0 standards while the GTX570 will be fine with version 2.0 PCI-E standards (and their mainly backwards compatible) it would not even get past the bios, infact I reckon it was halting even prior to that no matter how much juice I fed the card or the BIOS settings..</div><div><br></div><div>So neglecting all of this, I took some old skills and knowledge from the BitCoin ladies, purchased a ASROCK H81 pro board, (6 PCI-E slots see) steadily collecting GTX570 cards from CEX stores around the country online and I'm building a single GPU node instead..</div><div><br></div><div>Now I know what your going to say, why use these old boring GTX570 cards with only 480 CUDA cores, firstly each card is only £35 GBP, two year warranty to boot. So for £210 I can get myself 2880 CUDA cores and it will give me time to save up for upgrading these to GTX1080 cards as the price falls over a period of another year. </div><div><br></div><div>It will also help me get used to managing a multi card GPU cluster node, albeit second hand parts, but you have to start somewhere don't you. It also outs a bit more life into some older cheap, used cards!</div><div><br></div><div>By all means I would love to employ a 4U node decked out with XEON Phi cards, infact a complete rack full of them but the cheapest I can get my hands on a knights landing card is coming close to over £500 GBP and I reckon these 6 in total GPU cards will be much faster and also easier to work with, it's both nice that the XEON Phi cards have an inbuilt Linux OS subsystem but it's a bit of a bummer sometimes and to really eek out the extra horsepower that you really need some serious code tailoring to get you there..</div><div><br></div><div>I find that in itself the major drawback of folks buying into the XEON Phi family for coprocessing or offloading needs..</div><div><br></div><div>I do hope someone comes along with an idea I had many years ago to use SoC technology, I even have a 20x20mm ARM big.LITTLE SoC sat on my desk with 64 inbuilt ALU/Crypto/GPU cores and an array of these on a single PCI-E card I think would really make a good game changer in the coprocessing market.. (anyone want to invest in my PCB{shameless plug})</div><div><br></div><div>Anyway, my home lab beowulf cluster experience and experiments are doing well regardless of the hiccups and total waste of time spent on some areas.. It's all going nicely indeed :)</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>*I wonder, if everyone would like to post links of software they use with regards to beowulf and clustering so that I may catalogue all these links and put them in an html document on my company server, might help us all out or in the future :D</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div id="composer_signature"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><div><div>> Kind regards,<br>> Darren Wise Esq, <br>> <a href="http://B.Sc">B.Sc</a>, HND, GNVQ, City & Guilds.<br>> <br>> Managing Director (MD)<br>> Art Director (AD)<br>> Chief Architect/Analyst (CA/A)<br>> Chief Technical Officer (CTO)<br>> <br>> <a href="http://www.wisecorp.co.uk">www.wisecorp.co.uk</a></div><div>> <a href="http://www.wisecorp.co.uk/babywise">www.wisecorp.co.uk/babywise</a><br>> <a href="http://www.darrenwise.co.uk">www.darrenwise.co.uk</a></div></div></div></body></html>