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Folding@home at TSTC-Waco

maestro55

maestro55

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Nov 13, 2005
2,708
0
Goat Farm in Meridian, TX
http://watxgrid.tstc.edu

Texas State Technical College-Waco students, under the direction of instructor Walton Yantis, during the Summer of 2007 built several small scale supercomputers (shown below). Now during the Fall of 2007 the current Linux class is in the process of configuring the systems which will be taken and shown off at the Maker Faire in Austin, TX. This provides a great chance for students to get some hands on experience in configuring machines for use with High Performance Computing. The school is also home to a much larger supercomputing cluster (more information at the above link). Mr. Yantis is also currently putting together a certificate program and is hoping to offer specialized instruction for High Performance Computing.


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Richard:
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Jeff:
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Steve (me):
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Decrepit

Decrepit

macrumors 65816
Sep 6, 2007
1,146
1
Foothills to the Rocky Mountains
That is awesome.

Hands on experience in the construction and configuration of those boxes is so valuable. The VAST majority of college students I'm around can't install software, let alone put a computer together out of the box. Even the CIS folks. They can build a mean Access database, but they can graduate never having installed Linux or added memory to a PC.

Glad to see some schools still teach the tech.
 
maestro55

maestro55

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Nov 13, 2005
2,708
0
Goat Farm in Meridian, TX
twoodcc said:
that is awesome! thanks for sharing :)

could you tell us some specs on one of the machines?
Click to expand...

Sure, as for hardware all except for one of the clusters are making use of P4 boards, these have 2Ghz processors and 768megs of RAM on each board making a total of 10Ghz and 3.8 gigs of RAM for all the 5 node clusters. The only 10 node cluster was the first one built (the tall white) which has 10 1Ghz P3 boards and I believe they said 512megs of RAM per board. The big white one has three 750Watt power supplies while the 5 node clusters use 1 750watt power supply.

As for software we have used various different operating systems, we really liked BCCD which uses the OpenMosix Kernel (http://bccd.cs.uni.edu/). We also tried ParallelKnoppix and ClusterKnoppix.

The class was invited to display at the 2007 Austin Maker Faire and below is a link to some photos of the clusters on display there.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15404044@N00/sets/72157602596801166/
 
twoodcc

twoodcc

macrumors P6
Feb 3, 2005
15,307
26
Right side of wrong
maestro55 said:
Sure, as for hardware all except for one of the clusters are making use of P4 boards, these have 2Ghz processors and 768megs of RAM on each board making a total of 10Ghz and 3.8 gigs of RAM for all the 5 node clusters. The only 10 node cluster was the first one built (the tall white) which has 10 1Ghz P3 boards and I believe they said 512megs of RAM per board. The big white one has three 750Watt power supplies while the 5 node clusters use 1 750watt power supply.

As for software we have used various different operating systems, we really liked BCCD which uses the OpenMosix Kernel (http://bccd.cs.uni.edu/). We also tried ParallelKnoppix and ClusterKnoppix.

The class was invited to display at the 2007 Austin Maker Faire and below is a link to some photos of the clusters on display there.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15404044@N00/sets/72157602596801166/
Click to expand...

that's awesome. nice stuff. thanks for sharing :)
 
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