Building a Cluster

A cluster computer is basically many computers merged into one usually to perform a single task or process. A typical 'normal' cluster of course are blades, data centers and rackmounts but they will also cost more. Multiple desktops can also be used as a cluster, which is what I will be discussing in this post. A desktop cluster is of course cheaper.

The cluster I will be showing you today is of course build for small budget and for space saving. So we will be using Micro Atx boards and laptop hard drives so it can fit on our custom server rack which is a file cabinet.



Components (most of prices is as of Oct 2009 from American store 'newegg' in USD):
6x BioStar TForce TA780G M2+ Motherboard $73.99
6x AMD Phenom II X4 940 3GHz CPU $169.99
6x Antec EA380 380 W Power Supply Unit $44.99
6x Toshiba 160GB Sata Laptop Hard Drive $49.99
6x G-Skill 1GBX2 DDR2 RAM $44.99
6x EverCool 50mm Case Fan $3.99
1x File Cabinet (~$30 varies in price)
KVM Switches and/or Lan Cables (Varies in price)
Other Stuffs (OS, drives, GPUs are optional and varies too)




First thing of course is to Mod the cabinet so those micro Atx motherboards and power supplies could fit in the cabinet.




After modding the back of the file cabinet




Then inserting the power supply and cooler fan on to the file cabinet.




Then of course installing OS and testing if motherboard and CPU works. Monitors, input devices and the CD/DVD drives are only temporary.














After installing the components a single node should look like this:

For CPU cooling a stock CPU cooler should do, it is not recommended to overclock since you have little ventilation unless you plan to have a centralized water cooling for the entire cluster which of course is complicated to implement. And if it did overclocked it won't be that much high because of the chosen motherboard limitations.

Once all the nodes are completed and installed the final product should look like this:

Connecting the Nodes is by using KVM switches and LAN cables.
This also ran multiple instances of the OS. Of course this is not a typical cluster and made for a small budget and space saver.

You could probably build a dual socket motherboard cluster which is faster and better but of course will need more space and bigger power suply.

The cabinet is optional too it is just build there to save more space, you could buy 6x casings if you have no time to customize stuff but of course that will take much more space and budget.


Usage:
The cluster was build mainly for 3d rendering and for cancer research (folding@home). For chess, the engine of course does not use unified hash in using the entire cluster because of network latencies, it just sends part of the hash and pvs for analyzing. Also because of latencies it is also not suited for hyper bullet games but to cope with that it can work even one of the nodes fail in the middle of the game or analysis session. The cluster chess engine of course gains elo the more nodes you add (but faster nodes > than more nodes).

Conclusions:
If you plan distributed computing you can do what is posted here. And if you are worried about power consumption you can get the energy efficient CPUs instead. And compared to a real 24 core cluster this is way cheaper, the desktop cluster is just ~$2500 USD the real cluster or blade server can cost you more than $10,000.

Disclaimer:
I do not claim that this idea is original or the hardware used is mine, I barely can buy a decent hardware and I don't even pay for my school and apartment fees (I am a scholar).