[Beowulf] Cooling vs HW replacement

[George Georgalis]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 01:41:45AM -0500, Andrew Piskorski wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 01:33:22AM -0500, George Georgalis wrote:
>
>> Use a SAN/NAS (nfs) and keep the disks in a separate room than the CPUs.
>> Disk drives generate a lot of heat, and compared to on board components
>> don't really need cooling, circulated air should largely cover them.
>
>This is an oxymoron.  If disks generate a lot of heat, then that heat
>needs to be removed.  If you have a small room stuffed with hundreds
>of those disks, all that heat has to go somewhere...

I think you are absolutely right, especially about the heat delta. Per Dr
Brown's excellent response, that focused on the issue, the components
generate heat which must be removed, I still say a hot room, cold room
approach will be effective, and also point out disks can tolerate a
hotter ambient temperature than the other components. So a savings can
be made keeping memory/cpu/etc at lower ambient than disk storage. of
course if you only have one or two raid units and no other disks, then
there is no need to house them separately.

// George

-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george at galis.org