Super Computer
Well, the construction of my super computer has begun lol After having 2 Woodcrest based boards with quad-core Xeon support etc and finding out that they are EEATX and that the only compatible chassis’ are £250+ i had to go back to the drawing board.
I managed to shotgun some old server rigs from our labs that were being binned as part of our clean out, which were physically big enough. However the PSU’s werent pushing enough wattage, more to the point they didnt have the correct 4 pin ATX12v connectors. This is easy to fix, however when coupled with the fact that the chassis front panel method of connecting to the mobo is so outdated it isnt even google-able, i decided to scrap the idea (No jumpers?! WTF?!).
Im going to just recap a little here, the reason im actually building this machine is for my virtualisation final year project, whereby im going to need obviously a fairly powerful machine to run all the VM’s, VM technology etc. Ive already got Education licensing for all VMWare products, and Xen etc. However the hardware is the issue.
Fast forward to today, whereby using a bit of blag and some guile ive managed to commandeer myself a Intel S5000PSL, capable of supporting 2 Socket 771 Multi-core Xeon CPU’s – of which i have 2, Quad-Core Clovertown Xeons, which will do very nicely.
Now i have the motherboard, and the CPU’s sorted, i need to find where to get my other items. I have a load of EATX chassis’ at my desk, but they are very old and very clunky and well..”Grey”. So i decided to make my first investment of this project, and spend £110 on an Antec Titan, an EATX Server Chassis thats comes bundled with a 650w Antec truePower Trio! Which is normally worth £70 on its own anyway. A Definite bargain. This will go great with my board and CPU’s.
I bought 2 Xeon passive heatsinks off the Intel Shop, which hopefully (fingers crossed), will work first time with the board and the case (mounting problems perhaps?). All that i need to do now, is get some FB-DIMM’s and im sorted. I might be getting some free from work as we are upgrading all our RAM from DDR2 to DDR3 as part of our refresh, otherwise you can get them for £59 for 2GB which isnt too bad at all!
After ive got Motherboard, CPU, Chassis, Heatsinks, RAM i need to procure a CD Drive and im going to be sorted. Then i’ll use one of my many hard drives and the server will be ready to go.
Interesting thing about VMWare ESX is apparently need to attach an iSCSI SAN to get it to install (it worked fine on a single core, AMD CPU based workstation system i had), which was a total fluke obviously as it wouldnt install afterwards on a Q6600 based system, or a Celeron D based system (neither have SAN’s funnily enough).
A way to get round this, is to apparently create a software based Linux SAN (a distro), so i’m currently looking into this. Anyone know where i can get this from?
Anyway, onwards and upwards.