Best way to make a folding farm?

Resonant · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 4:46 am Post subject: Best way to make a folding farm?

I want to make a rig for Folding@Home, but I do not know of the best way to go about doing it. I was thinking of SMP, but that was only for multiple processors on a motherboard. Then, I started thinking about maybe doing a cluster. We were planning on purchasing ~3-5 seperate 2 Ghz systems, and linking them with something like LTSP. Does anyone have any advice or past experiences? Is there anyway to do this with Gentoo?

http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html says:

SerfurJ · l33t Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 824 Location: Texas

i think this is your answer (further down in that paragraph):

Resonant · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 2:36 pm Post subject:

Great, I feel stupid now for not reading down the paragraph. It was late at night, lol.

I think I'm probably gonna do an openMosix cluster, or something like Overclockix.

Oh, and my motiviation (not sure about my fathers), is that my friend's sister died a few months ago from cancer. I think it would be great to dedicate it to her, or something of the sort.

blueSceaDa · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Jan 2005 Posts: 90

there is a project like seti@home which helps in finding medicines against cancer...
maybe you want to know that ... you could run in on that cluster then
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Resonant · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 3:17 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 3:27 pm Post subject:

Resonant,

You just use a router. DHCP runs for an interface, not a PC, so it will serve addresses in responce to broadcasts on eth0, say but not eth1.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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Resonant · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 3:39 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 5:59 pm Post subject:

Resonant,

I have a seti@home farm
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

SerfurJ · l33t Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 824 Location: Texas

NeddySeagoon,

does that use a lot of electricity?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 7:32 pm Post subject:

SerfurJ,

Probably 60-80W per PC. I have 12 boxes, no keyboards, mice, monitors, mostly no video cards, CD-ROMS or floppies. I don't think I could take much more out. Making the boxes diskless would reduce the power further but thats a lot of work.
That costs about 7 pence per hour to run, total or about 1.70 UK Pounds per day.
PC power consumption has stayed fairly constant over the years.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

tkdfighter · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 10:39 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 10:19 am Post subject:

tkdfighter,

The boxes are all different, ranging from a 486 to a P3. They are things I have picked up from family and friends over the years. Its not like they can share a kernel. If I aquire a diskless box at a time when I don't have a spare hdd, I would have a go at a diskless node.
With one disk shared over 12 or so PCs, when it fails, they all stop. That single point failure is a bad idea.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

syg00 · Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 10:50 am Post subject:

tkdfighter · Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 2:43 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon, you have a point there. I was thinking of a homogeneous cluster. :oops:

DntKnwHw · n00b Joined: 14 Aug 2003 Posts: 74 Location: Philippines

tried building a diskless cluster of 3, (all netboot) if you want, i will give you the how to's

you need 3, (installing gentoo, installing mosix and installing it diskless,) you can find this all in the gentoo documentations,

took me a lot of trial and error testing to get my cluster working, and if you are having 12 box, a good bet is using a Gigabit and raid,

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2004.3/index.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openmosix-howto.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml

tkdfighter · Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 4:03 pm Post subject:

I thought about building a openmosix cluster like that once, but I gave it up because I don't have that many computers and because for me (as a student) it's hard to justify spending a lot of money on something I just want to play around with.

SerfurJ · l33t Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 824 Location: Texas

i made an openmosix cluster once. i thought it would speed up my computers for everyday use, but i don't use any apps that really take advantage of it. maybe it was because i don't have a gigabit network.

blatch · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 3:41 am Post subject:

I have an openmosix cluster in my dorm room. It gets really hot, and I have to shut it down at night cause it's too loud, but here are the specs: (I'll be folding once I get the bugs worked out)

6x1.2GHz Althon-Tbirds (yes tbirds, not mps)
3GB ram
250GB storage
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tkdfighter · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 3:36 pm Post subject:

Nice! What will you be using it for (other than folding)?

SerfurJ · l33t Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 824 Location: Texas

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 8:17 pm Post subject:

SerfurJ,

Its better than a WAG but its an estimate based on reading specificaions for the component parts for some of the PCs.
I'm not keen to measure it until the next power cut.
I suppose I can put a top limit on it by seeing how much power (kwH) I use overnight and divide by the time. Not much else runs overnight.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

SerfurJ · l33t Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 824 Location: Texas