22. That is really cool. Everybody that does clusters like this make it look easy. As soon as I can get my hands on a few spare computers I suppose I will make a project out of it.
Posted at 10:33AM on Apr 24th 2008 by Mike
23. @chupa
to be fair, a 'top of the line' PC might have a CPU that costs $1000 by itself, and another thousand dollars in video cards.
It's true you COULD build a pretty solid machine for $1000 (I've done it).
Besides, for the amount of power he's got, it seems like a solid investment, even at full retail. He mentioned he got a deal on the CPUs, so it'd be even ebtter.
Posted at 10:42AM on Apr 24th 2008 by dirk
24. janne - can you provide some more details on the software setup?
Your use of FreeNAS as a storage space intrigues me, and I am wondering if it might help me with my son's problem.
I'm quite new to rendering. My 11 year old has blender installed on our Windows PC. He just recently purhcased an AMD Dual Core system that I installed Ubuntu 7 on and blender 2.44.
(He's starting to play with lip syncing animations - http://www.flyinglow.ca/matthew)
25. I second the recommendation for PXE boot. I recently set up a cluster and used PXE boot. It turned out to be much easier then I expected. Google for "linux pxe boot". It was a simple matter of adding a few lines to the dhcpd config file, start a tftpd server, and putting the pxelinux (from syslinux) files in the right place.
Posted at 11:37AM on Apr 24th 2008 by Anonymous Canuck
26. So, you say that the cluster was cheap to build. Could we have a better idea on the price? Are we looking at $2000? More? Less?
Posted at 12:05PM on Apr 24th 2008 by Jeremy
27. lol i have the same ram sticks xD this is a nice and usefull device
Posted at 1:39PM on Apr 24th 2008 by Alex McCown
28. :O i want one too! thats pretty cool :D
Posted at 2:24PM on Apr 24th 2008 by Derek Vance
29. ...
"Render jobs that took all night, now gets done in 10-12 min."
With only 6 computers, how does it get a perfomance boost factor of 40-50X?
Is it maybe comparing an apple to an orange?
"Render jobs that took all night (on a 1GHz Celeron), now gets done in 10-12 min."
Posted at 6:54PM on Apr 24th 2008 by hb
30. That's very nice.
Only a matter of time before we all have computers with 64Gb of ram and 24 cores but I want it now.
Posted at 7:49PM on Apr 24th 2008 by Techyguru
31. I can think of more than a few situations where this could come in handy.
Posted at 8:54PM on Apr 24th 2008 by RT (Panzer Time!)
32. Does this mean the SouperComputer lives one?
http://www.extremelinux.info/stonesoup/
But I'd have to be certain soupercomputer required much more than 400W of juice. The metal work alone must have taken a week of Sundays to do.
Posted at 12:51AM on Apr 25th 2008 by Doug
34. Regarding FreenNAS. I used it because it's so easy to use, and works with PC, mac and linux/unix. ..and free :) For a home server, you can get a fan-less VIA-luke nano itx card, with 2 sata ports. Get 2x 1TB drives and you have a very good, low cost zero noise home server. Intel have just released the atom chip, and Im realy eager to see it in real life.
35. Wow that's kick ass .. I want to make one of those and then mount it on a pedestal that I will pray to every morning and night ! :)
Posted at 7:48AM on Apr 25th 2008 by DigitalMind
36. I think the question here is...what are they using all that rendering power for?
Oh - and can anybody say F@H cluster?
Posted at 9:26AM on Apr 25th 2008 by Ryan
37. Great idea and wonderful coincidence that this fits so smoothly into an Ikea file cabinet. Another issue is the PC-type hardware being used. I found standard-hardware to be not as reliable as it should be. With six of these boards fixing, debugging and administration can be quite a headache. I would spend some extra bucks to invest in server-hardware.
38. How much did it cost? That's what I'd like to know.
Posted at 10:31AM on Apr 27th 2008 by Dave
39. 29: I'm sure by 'all night' he means when he goes to bed it's going, and when he wakes up it's all done.
Posted at 6:31PM on Apr 28th 2008 by Kulawend
40. I ask myself what power he might get if he overclocks those babys. I think he uses Intel Q6600 Quat Processors these can take a clockspeed up to 4 ghz. Just think about what calculation power he might get - maybe up to 50 Gflops!!!
Posted at 8:50AM on May 4th 2008 by Atlantis
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21. "The most amazing is that this machine just costed as a better standard PC"
I think hes trying to say it cost as much as a top of the line rig. And if thats the case I find that hard to believe. just looking at RAM+CPU+Mobos from newegg i have a total of $2,478. I dont know if he got some better deals from the place he got his stuff from but 2.4K is a LOT of money, even for a top of the line rig.
570(mobo)+444(ram)+1464(cpu)
Posted at 10:14AM on Apr 24th 2008 by chupa