24 core Ikea cluster

Posted Apr 23rd 2008 9:11PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks

[Janne] does freelance animation and wanted something with a bit more CPU to get his rendering jobs done. He picked up an Ikea 'Helmer' cabinet and refitted it to hold six Intel quad cores, six Gigabyte motherboards with 8GB of ram each and six 400 watt power supplies. He seems happy with it - I think it just needs some custom power wiring and an integrated Gig-E switch to achieve perfection. What? I'm not jealous at all.

Reader Comments

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1. The site seams to be running pretty slow, anyone got a recent mirror?

Posted at 10:35PM on Apr 23rd 2008 by Wolf

2. his server is swamped. other than that it looks like a great project :)

Posted at 10:49PM on Apr 23rd 2008 by andrew

3. plz mirror..

must.. have.. super cluster..

Posted at 10:54PM on Apr 23rd 2008 by tjhow

4. I am working on a mirror of the site right now. Should be up within the hour. Will re-post or edit when completed.

Posted at 11:14PM on Apr 23rd 2008 by SgtStein

5. Damn his server is slow, Mirror anyone? If it would of loaded for me i could of mirrored it. Does anyone have a copy of the html and pics email me a .zip or .rar if you do. jojo1224_999@hotmail.com

Posted at 11:41PM on Apr 23rd 2008 by Joel

6. mirroring should be standard procedure before all us greedy hackaday users destroy sites bandwidths :D

Posted at 11:53PM on Apr 23rd 2008 by Zachary

7. coral caught it! http://www.yxx.se.nyud.net/helmer/

Posted at 11:57PM on Apr 23rd 2008 by Jevin

8. Go Coral!

Posted at 12:00AM on Apr 24th 2008 by Bullwinkle Jones

9. http://www.yxx.se.nyud.net:8090/helmer/

This seems to have the whole page.

Posted at 12:01AM on Apr 24th 2008 by ex-parrot

10. curses... foiled again ;)

Posted at 12:02AM on Apr 24th 2008 by ex-parrot

11. Coral Cache:
http://www.yxx.se.nyud.net/helmer/
Still slow but better than the direct link.
Just put .nyud.net at the end of the domain name of any website. Seriously, look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Content_Distribution_Network

Posted at 12:04AM on Apr 24th 2008 by ClenchedTeeth

12. did he use a single psu for this cluster of machines? i'd really like to try this out with a xen vm cluster...

Posted at 12:15AM on Apr 24th 2008 by allen

13. He mounted all 6 psu's so I'm assuming he used them all.

The quoted 400W power draw is most likely all 6 comps combined, at idle of course.

Posted at 12:25AM on Apr 24th 2008 by thug

14. New mirror of site here:
http://helmer.sfe.se/

Posted at 1:21AM on Apr 24th 2008 by Janne

15. i wonder how much power hes sucking down when rendering stuff.

Posted at 1:59AM on Apr 24th 2008 by tjhow

16. About 600W when rendering. Fans rev up a bit, but sound level still ok. Sorry for ny slow site. ;)

Posted at 3:20AM on Apr 24th 2008 by Janne

17. Janne, did you consider PXE booting the cluster? It would have reduced money, power and noise and increased the neat factor. Does your rendering app need local scratch?

Posted at 4:39AM on Apr 24th 2008 by Jason

18. I want one!!!!
Is there any possibility that he will go into more detail about it?
Soooooooo coool

Posted at 4:39AM on Apr 24th 2008 by PacketStorm4

19. You know, I wonder how this would compare to the one mini supercomputer that was shown on here before...

This is the exact one, but it's close enough - Microwulf

Posted at 9:57AM on Apr 24th 2008 by usmarineguy

20. Sorry about that, user issues...

microwulf - http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/

it isn't the exact thing i was thinking of, but it's close...

Posted at 10:01AM on Apr 24th 2008 by usmarineguy

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