Physical questions

Paul English tallpaul at speakeasy.org
Mon Jan 13 11:42:20 PST 2003


We are looking at building a second cluster and I have some physical 
installation questions. 

When I was at NASA goddard, I got a look at one of the Beowulf clusters 
there which had nodes which were just motherboards mounted on rails or a 
shelf which sat in the rack. Seems great to me to avoid purchasing a case 
if it isn't really needed - does anyone know any vendors for this sort of 
a mounting solution?  I found this one, but it looks like it includes the 
motherboards and the rack, while I'd like to just buy the shelves:
  http://www.kingstarusa.com/co-location/co-location_intelirack21.htm
I'd rather not fab my own, although I suppose that is an option. 

For the above setup, it seems ideal if it could use just one big power 
supply for the whole cabinet - are there any vendors for something like 
this? Ideally if it could be a UPS also to provide brown-out power that 
would be helpful, otherwise I'd have to sacrifice more rack slots to a 
UPS. 

Fortunately (and with a lot of help) I've pretty much got hardware and 
software built and tweaked pretty well for my needs now, so what I need 
to do for more power is - buy more! 

Thanks,
Paul




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