Re: [Plug] Beowulf and Multi-Processor systems

["Edward J. Sager" <ed@sagers.org>]

The amount of power you'd save would be nominal because most of it goes to things
like CPU's, RAM and drives.  "Bread boarding" a system is so difficult that you'd
never get to the good stuff like building a cluster.  I had looked into small
systems for clustering purposes and found that there is an entire world of
low-power micro-boards built around the PC-104 bus/interface.  That might be a
place to start..

Tim Peeler wrote:

> I submitted this to /. a few weeks back but I got no response, so I decided
> that I should share this with everyone on the plug list and see if I could get
> someone with enough talent to help me out.
>
> I've been thinking about creating an add-in multi-processor "beowulf" pci card,
> unfortunately I don't have the hardware know-how to even get started.  There's
> probably already something like this for high-end computers and the idea is
> somewhat taken from a rack computer and a cray, but with a twist.
>
> I know there's lots of people (myself included) that would like to play around
> with a beowulf linux system.  One of the problems I see with beowulf systems
> for us average geeks (read: broke bastards) is the power requirements.  You
> really couldn't run it all the time w/o breaking the bank to pay peco (not to
> mention the heat generated!).  So I've been thinking, you should be able to
> put a minimal 4 processor motherboard onto a pci card, provided that you've
> got all the required chipsets.  So far I realize that you'd need the following:
>
> 1.) A large clean breadboard w/ a pci connector.
> 2.) 4 cheap x86's (preferably 5 or 6 (pro, not II/III))
> 3.) 4 zif socets
> 4.) 2 dram sockets
> 5.) 2 128M dram dimms
> 6.) Specialized I/O chipset
> 7.) Power regulators & power supply (plugin from the main power supply from
>      your pc.
> 8.) Kernel drivers
> 9.) Ramdisk linux image
> 10.) 512 - 1024 ROM for kernel
>
> Like I said I don't have the hardware knowledge to make this fly or even get
> started.  But what I 'envision' is a pci based multiprocessor mini-motherboard,
> to create a plug-in beowulf system (assuming you have a free slot or 4 ;-)
> The biggest problem would be the I/O chipset, I don't think anyone here has
> their own rom burners and chip fab plants ;-)
>
> Once you've gotten the board the rest is easy, the board waits in an infinite
> NOP loop until the kernel booting your main MB has a chance to load a driver
> for the board, at which point it tells the board to begin it's boot sequence.
> (Loading the kernel, requesting and loading the ramdisk image into it's 128M
> dimm, setting up communication stuff, etc)
>
> I know I for one would like to have something like this that I could plug-in to
> my pc (if only to claim I have a beowulf system ;-)
>
> Tim
>
> Ps. If there's no way in hell to get this to work, or if there's something
> already out there that i've not seen, please don't flame me too badly :-P
>
> --
> I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a
> fundamental error.  Be thankful you are not my student.  You would not get a
> high grade for such a design :-)
> (Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds)
>
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