jasonpowers.net

For a few years now, I have been wanting to build a Beowulf Cluster… however, the cost of such a project has just became within range with the prices of memory and processors steadily on the decline.

For those of you who do not know what a Beowulf Cluster is… it is a collection of personal computers that are connected together to acheive high performance computing. Google it to see some pretty cool pictures (if you are into that sort of thing).

I do not have the funding of a enterprise company, a university, a hospital, a research center, or some government… so the cluster I build will be relatively small in comparison. My plan is to start off with 5 nodes, including the server… and add nodes as I streamline the process.

Primarily, I am doing this to mentally torture myself… really just to learn more about parallel programming. In the process, I may be able to offer researchers the ability to simulate chemical reactions, atmospheric modeling, protein folding for cancer research, physics simulations, etc… or in the end, I may just have one huge system to serve all of my favorite games 24/7.

I was starting off with setting up the master node with Fedora Core 8. Which was a mistake, because OSCAR does not support it yet. So, I can either drop back to an older version of Fedora, change Linux distributions to say… Redhat… or, download the source from their subversion directory and modify the code and recompile it… thereby creating support for Fedora 8 myself. The SVN content is still downloading… Pending how much time I anticipate wasting, I may just switch distros or replace OSCAR with a different clustering utility.

More later…

I decided a while back to scale down my network and related equipment, to get rid of things that I have not used in a long time. Call it a technical spring cleaning of you want…

I went from about 21 computers in my home office down to 10. The other computers were either scrapped for parts, combined into a single computer and given away, or thrown to the garbage. I could not bare to part with my SGI workstations or the 72 port network hub, so I decided to store them in my attic… until I had a new project in mind that may require them.

I imagine that the number of remaining systems will be cut in half again soon. Although, I plan on making a dedicated computer room soon when I get the power requirements figured out, I will end stacking in the rack mounted servers. and take the system count down to two, while probably boosting up to 12 to 24 rack mounted servers. Depending on if I am still interested in the beowulf cluster and parallel processing projects at the time.

For Christmas, my lovely wife bought me a Western Digital 1 TeraBtye (1TB) Pro Edition II MyBook (external hard drive). It is a dual-drive storage system with RAID and System Recovery Software. This one drive can hold more than all of the computers we own (~640GB), combined.

Here is the poop sheet:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=270

Important: The My Book Pro Edition II hard drive ships with a HFS+ (Journaled) format. This Macintosh native format is not compatible with Windows based computers therefore the drive will need to be repartitioned and reformatted before usage in a Windows based computer.

Ever format a hard drive? Try formatting a TB… it has been a long time, and the format has only progressed to 7% complete.

What it can hold:
Up to 284,000 digital photos
Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 24,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 76 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 400 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 120 hours of HD video

Note: One gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes. One terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes.

If you are interested in external hard drives, check out these links:
http://www.wdmybook.com/en/
http://www.wdmybook.com/en/compare/
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/index.asp?Cat=5&Language=en