My Boinc Crunchers!
Hi All!
Just want to show my rig.
Hope it inspire people to go big!
My goal is to fit all of these within a 15amp fuse. Basically a typical home wall socket!
Common questions
What is that?
Its called a blade. Blade are more compact and energy efficient than a traditional Rack server.
How much power does it use.
It depends on the configuration typical is 1300watts.
Mine uses off the shelf microatx board with a server PSU and low profile cpu cooler.
Where can I buy.
There are alot of places to buy 1.
You can start buidling yours here
http://www.buildablade.com
My Goal continue..
So far I got it to 202 watts at idle with no fan.
110 Watts when loaded each nodes (prime95)
80 watts avg while doing BOINC.
Hurdles/Problem.
1 nodes takes 160 watts at full.
Heat, these hits 100C at full load thus throttling.
Chassis fans takes 150 watts for cooling each.
To GPU crunch or just CPU?
Noise
Diskless? Hdd use avg 5 watts
Stability from tweaks.!
Solution:
Undervolting = same performance much cooler operation.
Observation:
1333 mem to 1600 adds 5 watts from the wall.
Turbo eats alot of watts.
GPU adds heat. Downclock it. no GPU projects.
Noise will drive you crazy.
Performance and Operating cost
1 cosmo@home is ~5min per node
At 1800watts(15amp) and running only at off-peak at .08c that $52 per month.
Break even or profit? NOPE! I do boinc without grc. GRC just gave me oppurtunity to BOINC more!
Have you considered flash sticks or sd cards as a storage?
Try screwing around the OS options and power management, it may yeld some watts.
What GPU they have? If it is integrated with no dedicated memory then do not crunch with it. It will eat memory bandwidth from cpu tasks.
Playing with voltages can save quite some power. Especially if you downclock.
yes. I opted not to use thr integrated gpu aside from higher watts and more heat. it hurts cpu performance.
ill go boincos or gentoo diskless and and thinking runing mosix for easy managment
yeah.. doing alot of undervolting and disabling some. no need for extra cooling
Didn't know nothing about it, but it's beautiful, congrats !
That's something! Congrats on your rig, a very good one!
thanks. it is for Science. made possible by GRC.
That looks awesome. I'd love to build a solar array that could handle that kind of wattage with battery power to make it feasible 24/7. Talk about taking BOINC Green ;)
Awesome setup , I run an HP C-3000 enclosure with 3 hp proliant bl460c gen6 ( i have a 4th ) and 1 bl480c ( i have 2 ) blades. Your setup is eh 50/50 blade maybe as it looks its standard ATX boards using standard ATX PSU's and I assume its 1 per machine using a propitiatory connector interface so you can slide out each blade and just slide it back in? Its more a VERY organized ATX setup and that means you can GPU crunch as blades such as mine have minimal video capabilities and is meant to be done remote. Additionally , my C-3000 has 6 x 1200w PSU and 6 super tubro fans ( 6 stacked ) and addon modules such as single or redundant Onboard Administrators to control the enclosure and manage it remotely along with HP iLO integrated lights out that is a hardware version of VNC with the ability to micro manage everything and lastly addon pass-threw ethernet and fiber optic modules and KVM and more. I have a C-7000 in storage with 16 BL460s I will upgrade to but as you mentioned your 15 amp limitation and that unit is 220v and my current 120v and I have to split it between 2 breakers/legs ( actually 3 right now due to my EMC CX4-120 SANS array ) I rewired the place a bit as the whole livingroom along with kitchen , hallway lights and the TV/media center uses the same 15amp leg. SOOOO the washer did not need its own 20amp and another 20amp was used for the other half of the livingroom and both 20 amp lines are dedicated to the blade enclosure setup with 1 PSU on the 15 amp for backup as the whole setup is typically 12-13amp. APC has inexpensive PDU's that are a power strip that shows the current draw threw it. Really awesome seeing it done with standard hardware , I knew someone had to make a case and interconnection interface for standard ATX hardware so its not really a " blade " its a standard low profile 1u machine sideways in an enclosure made to hold 8 machines per 6u of space?