LHC@home

Here's what I'll be getting myself this x-mas:

AMD Athlon X2 3600+ AM2
512 MB DDR2 RAM 667 Mhz
cheap mobo with integrated graphics, lan and so on
cheap case (will keep cat away from the fans and wiring)
cheap 1 GB USB stick (to boot from while programs are stored on fileserver)

And I'll make that 4 of those... making 8 cores crunch at aprox. 1.000 €

nice, eh?

:-D

Sysfried

First computer I put BOINC on (back in mid 2005) was an Intel 2.53 GHz machine I have since overclocked to 2.75 GHz (it struggles with Einstein, taking 34+ hours per WU, but works fine on Seti and Rosetta).
I then added an AMD 4800+ X2 @ 2.52 GHz in September 2005.
With the bug now biting I added an AMD 848 dual Opteron and an AMD 275 dual Opteron, added March/April this year, neither overclocked.

I have built all of them myself (still paying for the 2 Opterons).
I also have a laptop but the wife won't let me use that.
So all up I do BOINC with 4 computers, 9 CPUs, 20.99 GHz, 11 MB, 1,660 GB.

I am in 8 projects but have no credit from LHC@home as I keep missing the new WUs that get issued.

> Well I am still paying for the Opterons, so I thought why not go into debt a bit more eh? Have just bought 2 AMD Opteron 285 chips (dual core 2.6 GHz) to upgrade the 848 single core chips. Will be installing as soon as arrive.
Have also dropped the 4800+ back to default settings due to ASUS motherboard crashing when I overclock it.
> This will give me 6 CPUs, 11 cores, 26.75 GHz, 11 MB RAM, 1,660 GB Disk.

> @sysfried, Sounds like you will be having fun at Christmas, I am amazed that you can get 4 systems for around 1,000 Euros. It would cost a lot more here in Australia. I have just paid over $2,000.00 Dollars for 2 Opteron chips alone.

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> @sysfried, Sounds like you will be having fun at Christmas, I am amazed that you can get 4 systems for around 1,000 Euros. It would cost a lot more here in Australia. I have just paid over $2,000.00 Dollars for 2 Opteron chips alone.

Yeah, I'll be having fun! :-) Heck, my 244 Opterons cost me a fortune when I got them 2 years ago.

If I were you, I'd sell the Opterons right away and wait for the 4x4 Platform to arrive... Much better bang for your buck....

Want to know more, contact me at my 'nick@lhc' @ googlemail dot com

cheers,

Sysfried

I noticed that AMD just dropped its prices again.

One might hope this in preparation to clear the shelves in anticipation of the 4x4 release.

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While the farm isn't entirly mine, here is what I have:

Home:
P4 3GHz with HT
Celeron 2GHz
Celeron 2.2GHz Laptop
Pentium D 2.8GHz

Mine has grown since my last post. Along with the above, I've added 2 - P4 2.8GHz with HT and a Celeron 1.7GHz machine. The "new" Celeron was suppose to be my linux machine but it kept freezing, so much for stable linux, :). So I dual-booted my laptop instead because the hard drive got replaced. Addiction....taking....over......

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Hmm mine started out with 6 K6/2 300Mhz systems but as time went on my mobos died until i was down to just 1.
When my last faithfull k6/2 went kaboom i got myself a cleron 2Ghz cpu second hand grabbed a cheap mobo and off i went.
After this the bug struck and i started looking for second hand stuff to boost my capacity (and found linux much to my wallets liking)
I picked up a clery 700Mhz to add to my farm
And not long after had to buy a computer (celery 1.8Ghz) for my 7yo sisters birthday which now crunches part time. As you can guess i was thinking cruncher first lol.
Recently the poor old 700 quit due to a mobo issue and was down for weeks before i had the time to fix it. Unfortunatly i lost one of my 2 ram slots.
So when i thought it just might be terminal i went out pricing a replacement and ended up ordering a core 2 duo sytem when i was looking for another 2Ghz or so second hander.

So my current farm includes

Celery 700Mhz 256Mb RAM
Celery 1.8Ghz 512Mb RAM (part time)
Celery 2Ghz 512Mb RAM (the desktop i use)

And comming soon
Core 2 Duo 2.13Mhz 1Gb RAM

So 4 within a week or two and from there who knows but im not know for giving up on PCs that still run at all lol

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Started with a Celery/1.7 and P4/2.4 and like many of you, as I upgraded computers, I kept the old ones (or built new bare bone boxes from leftover parts)

Now running:
* Athlon 64 3700+ ( @ 2.64GHz)
* Athlon XP 3000+ ( @ 2.3GHz)
* P4/3.4 HT
* P4/2.8 Mobile
* P4/2.4

Had access to a quad 700MHz Xeon server at one stage but it died (and the XP 3000+ is at least as good a cruncher).

I've got a HP DL145 server but it's too noisy to run in my tiny house :(

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First computer I put BOINC on (back in mid 2005) was an Intel 2.53 GHz machine I have since overclocked to 2.75 GHz (it struggles with Einstein, taking 34+ hours per WU, but works fine on Seti and Rosetta).
I then added an AMD 4800+ X2 @ 2.52 GHz in September 2005.
With the bug now biting I added an AMD 848 dual Opteron and an AMD 275 dual Opteron, added March/April this year, neither overclocked.

I have built all of them myself (still paying for the 2 Opterons).
I also have a laptop but the wife won't let me use that.
So all up I do BOINC with 4 computers, 9 CPUs, 20.99 GHz, 11 GB, 1,660 GB.

I am in 9 projects but have no credit from LHC@home as I keep missing the new WUs that get issued.

> Well I am still paying for the Opterons, so I thought why not go into debt a bit more eh? Have just bought 2 AMD Opteron 285 chips (dual core 2.6 GHz) to upgrade the 848 single core chips. Will be installing as soon as arrive.
Have also dropped the 4800+ back to default settings due to ASUS motherboard crashing when I overclock it.
> This will give me 6 CPUs, 11 cores, 26.75 GHz, 11 GB RAM, 1,660 GB Disk.

>> Ok have now got the Opteron 285 chips in and working and along with 3 computers I have access to at work (Intel 2.4GHz Celerons), I now have
7 computers (3x Intel Celeron(2.4 GHz), 1x Intel 2.53@2.75 GHz, 1x AMD X2 4800+ (2.4 GHz), 1x AMD Opteron 275 (2.2 GHz) and 1x AMD Opteron 285 (2.6 GHz).
This gives 9 computer chips for 14 computer cores.
Total Giga Hertz = 33.95 GHz
Total RAM = 10.5 GB (had to remove 2 GB due to mixed memory modules)
Total Hard Disk = about 1900 GB.

Let the crunching continue upwards. And me continue working to pay for these computers.

>>>> @ Skip_Da_Shu
Not having case fans is one way to save power usage, but asthetics maybe a problem for some. If it works for you keep going. At least it would be easy to see if a computer stopped working and access is easy for maintainence.

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Here's part of my farm.

http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k134/samlapp/Picture01233.jpg

omg I WANT!

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Here's part of my farm.

http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k134/samlapp/Picture01233.jpg

omg I WANT!

>> And what is the other 'part'? It is an impressive first 'part' as I think I counted 21? machines, it dwarfs mine and gives me something to aspire to.

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Here's part of my farm.

http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k134/samlapp/Picture01233.jpg

omg I WANT!

>> And what is the other 'part'? It is an impressive first 'part' as I think I counted 21? machines, it dwarfs mine and gives me something to aspire to.

I have a single Pentium IV 3.0GHz, plus the old Pentium II doing only RCN (because of its low RAM usage). I sooooo want a dual-core...

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I am so envious of that rack setup....those just so much better than a vertical setup like mine.
Since we seem to collect systems of various sizes and shapes.
they never fit into a typical 19" rack setup.
so then I have to butcher one into a 4u or 5u case in order get it into my APC Netshelter rack setup.

I nearly got a pair of those about a month ago for free.
Well nearly free....I had to load them up and transport.
But between work and a garage full of schtuff....I had no room for them.

very cool.

My farm has a new crop of Intels.....P4 3.73, P4 3.4 , Core2duo 2.66, Core2quad 2.66 !

Keeps the LHC's coming !

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>>>> @ Skip_Da_Shu
Not having case fans is one way to save power usage, but asthetics maybe a problem for some. If it works for you keep going. At least it would be easy to see if a computer stopped working and access is easy for maintainence.

Almost as if someone thinks there's some problem with my dust and dog hair covered basket stack ;-) Hey I clean it off once a year.

Actually I got my wife to stop at the GoodWill computer store and sweet talk them into a giant fist full of the LEDs that come out of the systems they tear apart for $1USD. So I added a green power LED and a red HDD activity light to each basket.

Started to shift from old socket A AMDs to Sempron 754s (cheap and very overclockable) but now that you can pick up a 4200+ X2 for $180... headed that way for now. That is when I'm not sending every last penny to the electric company ;-) Texas is finally cooling off so the A/Cs are off... so maybe I'll see the bill drop by December and can replace the oldest socket A with a 939 X2 (still have some extra DDR400 sticks and old HDDs around).

Also, I have a couple old Intel CPU & HSFs that, if this guy doesn't pick them up tomorrow, anybody willing to pay the shipping (in USA about $5) can have them.

One of them is a 900 Celeron Info here

and the other is a 166 Pentium of some sort.

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- da shu @ HeliOS,
"Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer".

The farm is always growing new crops and system upgrades.

Out with systems that are single proc and in with the dual proc HT goodness.
I wish I could afford more of the quad core goodiees....but my Boincing habit requires me to ride the back of the tech wave.



I got to see a proc the other day with the word " octal " etched into it..........hrmmmm?

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My existing mini-farm :-
Celeron 2.4 GHZ, 512MB, 80 GB HD (x3 all at work)
Pentium 4 2.53 @2.66 GHz, 1 GB, 2 x 80 GB HD (160 GB)
AMD 4800+ 2.4 GHz (4.8 GHz), 2 GB, 2 x 250 GB HD (500 GB)
AMD Opteron 275 2.2 GHz (8.8 GHz), 4 GB, 2 x 250 GB HD (500 GB)
AMD Opteron 285 2.6 GHz (10.4 GHz), 2 GB, 2 x 250 GB HD (500 GB)

Gives 33.86 GHz, 10.5 GB RAM, 1,900 GB HD and 14 CPU cores.

Have added another self built AMD Opteron 285 with 2 GB RAM and 2x 250 GB HD

Brings total to 44.26 GHz, 12.5 GB RAM, 2,400 GB HD and 18 CPU cores.

I might retire the Intel P4 2.53, have stopped doing Boinc on it for the time being and using it for e-mail, print server and web browser.

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Brilliant.

Been selling the xeon farm to fund a new dual Xeon 5355 system.
Considering a single 5150 machine can do the work of 5 dual 2.8's combined,
it only makes sense to keep the power consumption down.
Out with last years technology...in with this months tech.
Procs and the FBdimms are in hand....motherboard will arrive today.
Just waiting on some clips from Koolance and this system will be on water.

Very interested to see how fast the new Opterons are !!

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I have this idea of taking a bunch of dead laptop computers, striping them down (no keyboard, display, battery), repairing and pumping them up a bit, and stacking them in a simple & compact manner. The networking will be a bit tricky, but I think I can do it. The farm will consume little power with the adapters, and VERY little power if I can devise a "centralized DC power adaption system" via the technique of splice, gage, connect and hope you don't smell smoke. The best part is, it will fit in my modest domicile.

What do you think, guys? Will it work?

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Ariel: Certified "Too Cute for LHC" Cruncher!


. . . . . . . . . . . . -- Consider the lilies.

Been selling the xeon farm to fund a new dual Xeon 5355 system.

I've been trying to get the boss to buy me a SuperServer 6015T filled with Clovertowns, but "because it's cute" apparently isn't sufficient justification. :(

Weird though: now we look at something like that and coo over how we get an entire farm in one box, whole new paradigm, blah blah...
Years ago I used a Sequent Symmetry (16 i386 CPUs) ... progress, eh?

Henry

Here is the newest crop on the farm !

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5355 @ 2.66GHz
Number of CPUs 8

.....only to think........whats gonna be fast in a year !

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here's what I have at my fingertips:

4 x quad socket Xeon 7110 (total 8 cores per machine at 2.6 GHz)
10 x dual socket Xeon 5110 (total 4 cores per machine at 1.6 GHz)

and a bunch of 2.8 GHz P4D's....

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