Project Diablos
citrixmeta
Montreal, Quebec Icrontian
Citrixmeta, of Team Icrontic, has a crazy idea to bring in an enormous amount of points for the team…
Introducing project "Diablos"
A giant cluster of computers folding for Team 33693! Essentially, all that is needed for each node of this folding monster is a CPU (1GHz or more), CPU Heatsinks, Motherboard, RAM, Power Supply (250W or more), HDDs, NICs, 52u rack with, trays ,hubs/switches, Ethernet cables, Power cables, etc.
Fortunately, almost all of the above is already covered.
All we are missing include:
- CPUs (and heatsinks)
- Motherboards
- Power Supplies
Over time, we will be accumulating parts, probably off eBay, to build it. Also, it would be great to somehow get the whole cluster running as efficiently as possible, so the choice of OS or method of linking these machines together is important.
Do any among the team have spare parts or experience with this sort of undertaking? Imagine the possibilities for the F@H project and the team!
post your comments please.
Join Project diablos Signature.
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Introducing project "Diablos"
A giant cluster of computers folding for Team 33693! Essentially, all that is needed for each node of this folding monster is a CPU (1GHz or more), CPU Heatsinks, Motherboard, RAM, Power Supply (250W or more), HDDs, NICs, 52u rack with, trays ,hubs/switches, Ethernet cables, Power cables, etc.
Fortunately, almost all of the above is already covered.
All we are missing include:
- CPUs (and heatsinks)
- Motherboards
- Power Supplies
Over time, we will be accumulating parts, probably off eBay, to build it. Also, it would be great to somehow get the whole cluster running as efficiently as possible, so the choice of OS or method of linking these machines together is important.
Do any among the team have spare parts or experience with this sort of undertaking? Imagine the possibilities for the F@H project and the team!
post your comments please.
Join Project diablos Signature.
<img src="http://www.teamicrontic.com/diablosjoin.png" border="0">
![http://www.teamicrontic.com/diablosjoin.png"](http://www.teamicrontic.com/diablosjoin.png"){kind=link}
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Comments
This sounds like a great project, and its in the name of folding so it also has a great cause! I'm in for what ever i am worth.
I don't have any spear parts to donate, but I can send yea some cash. I can tell you this one thing, seems that the Linux folding client is slow and unstable. People are find that running the windows client under Wine gives them much better performance and stability, and that the Windows client even runs faster under Wine then under Windows.
thanks for the kind words guys.
well, we will discuss all the technical stuff once a few parts start coming in.
we are going to run a few tests and decide on the setup.
thanks guys!
I can't wait to make my own site and hopefully Tex will be back in charge so he can give me the new team!
Amd Athlon Tbred 1700+
Amd Athlon Tbird 1.0ghz
300 Watt Powersupply
This should help get us off to a good start.
im getting a mobo 2mmorow, we need 1 psu people!! and we got 2 nodes already.
thanks trippin
Good luck with the Diablos, you guys.
i actualy found a few documents, im working on a diskless boot to win98 (rumor has it *nix folding is slow and unstable)
thanks alot for the info!
o/c has 1 member that built a 6 node, Yattamonster that only uses 2 hard drives, with the other 2 nodes per layer using a network boot off the master of that layer.
Thiis is a link to stymee's thread there about his Yattamonster Jr. and he has some nice pics and some links too. Even if you don't want to *nix it, it is still a nice thread to check out and see the workmanship that he put into his cluster.
OMG !! what a great HOWTO!!
im definitly going to try this tonight!
thanks again muddocktor for the support!
/me waves at trippin!
http://diablos.icrontic.com
This site will be updated regularly with information from this thread and the donation thread.
That accually is a serious issue, but luckily it seems that citrixmeta's server room is air condioned, well wired, and has a strong circuit breaker. If it wasnt we would have some problems, because this thing is gonna draw some amperage. 10 nodes will draw probly around 1500 watts or more which is substanial!
Also, Citrix, if you can get W98 to work diskless, can you post a link to a how-to here?
this week we should have the 1st node (bsd) running and booting off a BSD box.
then we can bench/test.
trippin isnt following any documents, he is writing one
as for the win98 diskless, here it is
http://www.nelliott.demon.co.uk/distributed/windows_diskless/how_to_build.html
Easier, would be to make the manager box a server, and delegate to clients. If you want pure peer to peer and have a router, it could mitigate network connects or you could build a Linux router to interface to web, then each blade could get its OWN by connecting via LAN and using router as gateway. In this last case, if you used dialup to send and receive data, you might be able to have the router box only do routing, hook modem to router box whihc could be BSD or Linux, and then let each machine vie for a connect since the clients will resend in Linux if modem is down or connection to internet fails. to the blades under the router box's umbrella, you could set them to use a gateway to internet with the router bnox as a gateway for them and the dialout the router box's gateway.
That is basicly how we got Windows for Workgruops to dial out way back when and is fairly simple to do if someone knows PPP (AKA PTPP) and how to set up a single subnet lan.
IF you want a wild idea, my Linux box now thinks it is a peer surfing on a worldwide LAN\WAN with End Point Security(it guards itself), no cable modem driver it knows of-- Zoom 5041 will run Linux transparently on most Cable companies in US. THAT part alone I could help with well, as well as defining a subnode, but I do not use Dialup on Linux as that is more complex due to the variants of ways to dialup used by different ISPs.
with multiple boxes, easiest way is a router box ot outside world, which does NOTHING but route and can be slower than any of the blades it is routing for, with a cluster semi-protected by the router'ssecurity with each balde doing nothing but fold.
Depending on how big the blades are, most of the cluster could also be KVM'd with each blade run headless as far as monitor (technically, you COULD skip a video card per peer\client blade with a good blade cluster and SSH from one box with X on it(or not, if there is aUnix admin or BSD admin or Linux admin in the house) and have the blades each talk to the controller blade as to data-- inverse of a Server to dumb terminal star lan structure as far as being headless, but that is one way to do that part-- software called vnc is used there with ssh logins to keep secure). COULD even be set up for remote, as Linux does have mail transfer agents included and email notifies could be used once things were stable with a remote connect-in to fix problems.
John.
mobo and psu have arrived, we are waiting for the CPUs that trippin sent and were ready for Node1
CPU's are in!!!
1700+ and a duron!! node 1 should be up tonight/tommorow
We were planning on running a diskless headless nodes. No need for a video card at all. If I need to make sure folding is running I will just ssh into the box.