Second Beowulf

[devilsown]

I would like to set up a second Mini-Beowulf, kinda like the one already made, but with 10 or so boards...
Looking for suggestions on which hardware to use, etc...

thx

I shall call it, MINI B

 

[Mardeth]

Well it cant be exacly "mini" beowulf if its going to be bigger than the ordinary beowulf 🙂.

 

[RaySun2Be]

Are you going to call it Mini B"?

😉

I would take a look at what they used for the 1st Beowulf. Basically you want the cheapest/best featured MB paired with the fastest/cheapest CPU combo. Depends on your pocket book.

 

[Baldy18]

The ECS K7S5A mother board works great for crack racks. Pair that with a cheap XP or Duron processor and 128-256MB of RAM and small hard drive and it should give you a lot of bang for the buck. How much are you looking to spend total?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Baldy18
The ECS K7S5A mother board works great for crack racks. Pair that with a cheap XP or Duron processor and 128-256MB of RAM and small hard drive and it should give you a lot of bang for the buck. How much are you looking to spend total?

A single setup like that would probably cost a little under US$200, maybe considerably less if you buy refurbed stuff from newegg. It would make a great cruncher as-is, or you could experiment with netbooting Linux or *BSD and save perhaps as much as $60 per unit on hard drive costs (only a large, high performance - say, a Western Digital "Special Edition" - drive would be needed for the boot server).

 

[devilsown]

well...for $139 canadian or $93.10 US i can get an "all-in-one" mobo with a duron 1300 🙂 (which i believe can do a wu in about 5.58 hours (5 hr 34 min) or around that). Think that s a good price?

 

[paf077]

I can get that ecs combo with a 1400 duron for 125$, add 256mg of pc 2100 and you should get around 5:00-5:15 per wu!😀

Paf

 

[devilsown]

american $?

 

[devilsown]

Paf Said:

i can get that ecs combo with a 1400 duron for 125$, add 256mg of pc 2100 and you should get around 5:00-5:15 per wu!

Thx Paf, didnt know who made the board...but i found it, it is the ECSK7SEM.
Looks like a solid board to me. What does everyone else think?

ECS K7SEM Specs @ ECS.com.tw

 

[Baldy18]

Looks like a winner to me. I think that is the board that BBR is using in their "Crunchenstein" but I'm not totally sure.

 

[aberant]

there's quite a few posts floating around various BBS's that those boards are crap, so i'd do some very careful research b4 committing 🙂

 

[Crazee]

No you don't want the K7SEM, it will turn in much slower times. The ECS board that you want is the L7SOM if you are going with a SIS chipset linky It uses the SIS 740 chipset which gives you the perfomance of the 735 but with the integrated features of the 730 chipset.

I have a crack rack with 13 nodes and that is one of the boards I have used. It puts good times out and has some overclocking capabilities.

 

[networkman]

I have a single K7SEM board in my fleet - currently running an XP1600 with 384meg SDR(133) - it uses a SiS730S chipset. All of my K7S5A boards(6) are running XP2000s and have the SiS735 chipset.

In overall performance and configuration(BIOS), I prefer the K7S5A, and considering I got a bunch of them at the refurb price of $35 each (US) from NewEgg, that's all the better. I have a couple more sitting on the shelf that I have yet to assemble.. once I re-map the electrical circuits in my house. :Q 😱