Greetings again.  A few new additions since last time!  Yet another state auction provides new components for the cluster.  At the last auction a few Dell 220S storage arrays and a couple new 2u servers.  My work has been allowing me to work on some cluster related items from time to time, and hopefully soon we’ll have a cluster running at work!  For the time being, i’ll continue to work on my stuff here at home.  Next step is a distributed storage array with the older servers.  Hopefully a tutorial and results coming soon! Stay tuned.

Well, I’ve just gotten started on a project that has been on the backburner for a long time.  I’ve wanted to make a Linux cluster for quite a while.  I attempted one a couple years ago, but due to the size and noise it wasn’t very feasable to keep up and running.  This time around I’m looking at something more permanent.  A couple months ago I ran accross a Dell Poweredge 1650 on an auction.  This had all the things I was looking for in a cluster node.  Low cost due to it’s age, dual processors (P3 in the 1.2-1.4ghz range), plenty of ram and dual Gigabit ethernet adapters onboard.  After watching a while on ebay, I’ve now filled out the remainder of my machines.  Each is configured a bit differently, but I’m up to 4 1u servers.  I loaded Ubuntu feisty on the first node, set up syslinux, dhcpd and nfs, and got the network booting rolling.  I’m currently testing build times of the linux kernel with distcc.  This gives the machines a good workout.  I’ll be posting later a series of howto articles for setting up the parts of this system.  For the time being, I’ve constructed a complicated space heater for my basement!

Well today concluded a good day at the state auction. I ended up with a few new pieces of hardware. Easily the buy of the day was an HP xw8000 workstation. This beast came with 2×2.8Ghz Xeon CPU’s and 2GB of ram to start. It also included a nVidia Quadro4 980 XGL video card. Hooked this up to my main screen set (3 19″ LCD panels) and am now running Ubuntu Feisty with Beryl at 3840×1024. Talk about a smooth desktop! This will be a great workstation for now, until project Hydra is complete. More to come on that later!

The first and hopefully not last posting on the new blog!

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