I'm among the undead today after something like four hours sleep last night.
I was cleaning my workshop and then attacked the living room junk collection. I was up until long after 1AM.
I think karma paid me a dividend, though. It would seem there's someone out there who worked for Linux NetworX back in the day. Maybe I can get some advice?
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Expect the Unexpected
Tonight I was looking at a motherboard I had intended to use for the home theater PC in the living room and figured out that it would be a good manager node for the supercomputer. It's only packing an Athlon XP, but that's still fast as hell for what it will be doing (shuffling data around and screaming at compute nodes)
In addition, I have ten computers in my storage bay that are packing Athlon XP 2000+ CPUs and could be turned into a reasonable cluster by themselves. They aren't fast, but that matters for dick, really, since they were $5 each and I can stock them with a gig of RAM per node for about $15 each. I don't know how I will be able to set them for Coreboot, though.
In addition, I have ten computers in my storage bay that are packing Athlon XP 2000+ CPUs and could be turned into a reasonable cluster by themselves. They aren't fast, but that matters for dick, really, since they were $5 each and I can stock them with a gig of RAM per node for about $15 each. I don't know how I will be able to set them for Coreboot, though.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Insert Witty Title Here
I'm just dumbfounded. I have a sense of "No way it's that easy".
The supercomputer I bought is going to be quite easy to deal with, it seems. I found it uses LinuxBIOS, now known as coreboot. That explains why it has no signs of hard disks ever being installed in the machine. This is going to save some energy. It still means I have to have the rigs maxed on RAM and Gigabit Ethernet might not be enough.
The supercomputer I bought is going to be quite easy to deal with, it seems. I found it uses LinuxBIOS, now known as coreboot. That explains why it has no signs of hard disks ever being installed in the machine. This is going to save some energy. It still means I have to have the rigs maxed on RAM and Gigabit Ethernet might not be enough.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Cleanup... Like... Everywhere
It's almost 11:30PM and I'm out in my workshop, de-junking and organizing again.
I have a renewed sense of purpose after discovering a few minutes ago that I have a shot at the Linux NetworX IceBox unit that I need for my supercomputer to get it running. I'm so doing this. I have laptops to prepare and sell off. This will happen.
I have a renewed sense of purpose after discovering a few minutes ago that I have a shot at the Linux NetworX IceBox unit that I need for my supercomputer to get it running. I'm so doing this. I have laptops to prepare and sell off. This will happen.
Rendered Useless?
I started working on Blender 3D rendering tests using Yafaray raytrace render tests. I saw that people were scoring around 3 minutes on an Intel i7 920 with the test scene that features a glass block, semi-glossy floor and two Suzanne the Blender Monkey solid models.
I gave it a whirl and: less than 3 seconds
Okay, but it looks like an early 80s pop music video, all burned out and nothing like the intended output. With that fixed, I ran it again: 27 minutes
WTF? How is it that slow? I looked at Windows Task Manager and saw that my Two CPUs and 4 threads were severely underutilized. So I quit for the night and played World of Warcraft with my wife. Suzanne the Monkey could wait.
Still, I couldn't help but wonder if my rack of Dual Xeon 2.4 nodes would still be woefully underpowered due to age at this rate. 27 minutes a frame divided by six nodes is 4.5 minutes and my workstation is using Dual 3.2GHz 553MHz FSB Xeons. Uh oh. Even slower.
But the test I ran is under Windows XP Pro 32-bit and that's insanely slow compared to Linux, based on the other benchmarks I was seeing.
Today I tried again. This time I understood things a bit better. It would seem the exporter is now required and I have to set the parameters from the right-hand menu that comes up when I select the exporter from the render menu. It's set for one thread. That explains a lot. Since I had disabled Hyperthreading to see if that was the issue, I was running with the two CPUs 1:1 style. This time: just under 15 minutes.
That's a lot better. Now to re-enable Hyperthreading and see what that gets me. Should net a 20% decrease in render time. Time to test for that. Reboot!
10.5 minutes under Windows XP Pro when Hyperthreading. That'll do.
Soon I shall see how Linux fares.
I gave it a whirl and: less than 3 seconds
Okay, but it looks like an early 80s pop music video, all burned out and nothing like the intended output. With that fixed, I ran it again: 27 minutes
WTF? How is it that slow? I looked at Windows Task Manager and saw that my Two CPUs and 4 threads were severely underutilized. So I quit for the night and played World of Warcraft with my wife. Suzanne the Monkey could wait.
Still, I couldn't help but wonder if my rack of Dual Xeon 2.4 nodes would still be woefully underpowered due to age at this rate. 27 minutes a frame divided by six nodes is 4.5 minutes and my workstation is using Dual 3.2GHz 553MHz FSB Xeons. Uh oh. Even slower.
But the test I ran is under Windows XP Pro 32-bit and that's insanely slow compared to Linux, based on the other benchmarks I was seeing.
Today I tried again. This time I understood things a bit better. It would seem the exporter is now required and I have to set the parameters from the right-hand menu that comes up when I select the exporter from the render menu. It's set for one thread. That explains a lot. Since I had disabled Hyperthreading to see if that was the issue, I was running with the two CPUs 1:1 style. This time: just under 15 minutes.
That's a lot better. Now to re-enable Hyperthreading and see what that gets me. Should net a 20% decrease in render time. Time to test for that. Reboot!
10.5 minutes under Windows XP Pro when Hyperthreading. That'll do.
Soon I shall see how Linux fares.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Fall Surplus Sale Success
YES!
Standing in line for hours on end, and being able to outrun my competition, paid off. My spoils of war are undergoing restoration now.
Linux NetworX Evolocity Supercomputer
10-node cage, six nodes populated
Dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs in each node with 3 or 4GB Dual Channel RAM on a SuperMicro motherboard.
It's the supercomputer I was going to build last year times two and then some, packed in about a tenth of the space and with so much more RAM.
I don't know how many "U" tall the whole cage is, but my plan is to get a rack large enough to put two cages into if I happen to be lucky enough to score a second one at any point.
With Linux supporting PAE on the Xeons, I can go over the 4GB limit of Windows and take advantage of the six RAM slots on each motherboard. Even if I only break up the 512MB modules to fill the empty slots in the 4GB nodes and buy eight more 1GB modules to even the system nodes out, that's still 5GB per node and like $100 invested in RAM modules. The same amount of RAM in a desktop system would cost three times that much.
I just can't run Windows on this system. It's not fair in the least. I do have the licenses for it, though. I'd just be severely limited in terms of memory space.
In addition to the supercomputer, I also picked up a Dell D810 laptop with a busted LCD panel. More likely put out of its misery since it was a 1280x800 panel and not one of the good ones. I can have it fixed for about $80 with a WUXGA 1920x1200 panel. Supposedly, these systems are limited to 2GB RAM, which makes zero sense to me, but whatever. It will likely become my Windows PC while the Dual Xeon 3.2GHz rig with Radeon HD2600 becomes my Linux workstation first and Windows gaming system second.
Standing in line for hours on end, and being able to outrun my competition, paid off. My spoils of war are undergoing restoration now.
Linux NetworX Evolocity Supercomputer
10-node cage, six nodes populated
Dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs in each node with 3 or 4GB Dual Channel RAM on a SuperMicro motherboard.
It's the supercomputer I was going to build last year times two and then some, packed in about a tenth of the space and with so much more RAM.
I don't know how many "U" tall the whole cage is, but my plan is to get a rack large enough to put two cages into if I happen to be lucky enough to score a second one at any point.
With Linux supporting PAE on the Xeons, I can go over the 4GB limit of Windows and take advantage of the six RAM slots on each motherboard. Even if I only break up the 512MB modules to fill the empty slots in the 4GB nodes and buy eight more 1GB modules to even the system nodes out, that's still 5GB per node and like $100 invested in RAM modules. The same amount of RAM in a desktop system would cost three times that much.
I just can't run Windows on this system. It's not fair in the least. I do have the licenses for it, though. I'd just be severely limited in terms of memory space.
In addition to the supercomputer, I also picked up a Dell D810 laptop with a busted LCD panel. More likely put out of its misery since it was a 1280x800 panel and not one of the good ones. I can have it fixed for about $80 with a WUXGA 1920x1200 panel. Supposedly, these systems are limited to 2GB RAM, which makes zero sense to me, but whatever. It will likely become my Windows PC while the Dual Xeon 3.2GHz rig with Radeon HD2600 becomes my Linux workstation first and Windows gaming system second.
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