Building the team a seti farm.

HAL6000 · Post by **HAL6000** » Wed Dec 10, 2003 10:19 pm

I have been digging stuff out as I unpack and I have come across 2 slot 1 boards, a 64mb dimm, a 333 slot and some various video and network cards, a 230w power supply, a few ps2 mice, and a 4gb 50 pin scsi drive. Also I seem to have a large number of usb extension cables if you could use any of them. A male to A female cables. I might have some more stuff still. I do not have everything unpacked yet.

I no not know what does and does not work. I may test some of it first so I don't send you a munch of broke shtuff

[/i]

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 4:18 pm

*hands hal a new keyboard and a copy of mavis beacon teaches typing*

hey man don't worry about it, if it don't work, no loss. if it does.. big gain

any mobo's that are donated will be put into the stack.. none will be used for anything else (unless i have a psecific use for it and has something to do with the stack)

just let me know when it's en route so i can watch for it.

again, if anyone needs help with shipping or has things that want shipping paid i will see what i can work out in that matter.. just talk to me

Kuun

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Tue Dec 16, 2003 2:36 pm

ok

uallas5 i have recieved the following hardware from you

4x celeron 366 cpu's
1x amd duron (i think it's 800mhz)
3x slot 1 p2 266
2x slot 1 p2 350
4x slot 1 heatsinks+fan
an unknown slot 1 mobo

24seven · Post by **24seven** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 4:39 am

Wow, sounds like its going to be one nice little farm if you get that lot running Kuun.

Post by **Derek** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 3:39 pm

Yeah! Cool! Get that stuff running kuun!

InactiveX · Post by **InactiveX** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 9:08 pm

I'll be expecting the lights to go out in Tennessee any day now.

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 9:36 pm

hahahahaha

thats so not funny

InactiveX · Post by **InactiveX** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 10:01 pm

kuun wrote:hahahahaha

thats so not funny

Oooo-oooo-oooh! Get her!

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 11:25 pm

get her?

im lost

you have any idea how much i've been picked on about making the southern part of the US loose power?

i went al lthrough highschool with ppl saying that "one day, all of tennessee will be in completel blackness... but Kuun's computers will be running..."

Post by **Derek** » Fri Jan 02, 2004 1:33 pm

How're things coming along?

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Fri Jan 02, 2004 11:49 pm

not good

i am attempting to aquire a slot a socket a and a slot 1 mobo for the cpu's i got from uallas5

3 mobo's $50

not bad... one is a kt7raid

as well as a few power supplies

BTW uallas5 the 800 works.. i let my brother in law use it since his XP 1600 is fried until he can get a new one.

Dave Rave · Post by **Dave Rave** » Mon Jan 05, 2004 3:30 am

well, apart from saying again that you will need a central SetiQ to show who's doing what

Derek (or some1) should set up an email like stack@bp6.com or farm@bp6.com so anybody anywhere can login their computers and contribute to the bp6 farm

the SetiQ will allow us to see the separate stats for each part of the farm
if you want separate names for each part of the farm, the bp6 stats page won't show much, as you won't be able to pick the little parts of each contributor out of the whole inactive pages. and there's a a lot of them

kuun
i have three bp6's sitting inactive at t the moment with upgr5ades to piv 2.4hgz much economiaclly faster at 3 * 8 RPD instead of 3 * 3 RPD

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Mon Jan 05, 2004 9:19 pm

dude yeah! i'll definately takes some bp6's for the stack...

Billl · Post by **Billl** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 3:20 am

I've been watching this thread for a while now and I have a few questions. I have a ton of old hardware here and I've been trying to figure out A) Is this worth bothering with? B) Will using this old stuff actually be more cost effective then just buying a cheap Mobo and P4 and overclocking it? C) If you do try this how do you do it with out hard drives and assuming your using a windows environment? D) Assuming one was to use a MS OS then which version would work best win95 with win 32's added, win98, win NT, win 2K, or XP?

As you can probably tell from the above I am lacking in the small drives part. Other wise I have most of the other parts needed. I'm not really looking for donations as much as I am looking for advice here.

Here is a list of the potential hardware I can use for this project.

3 BP6's with dual 366 celeron's
4 VH6's with 366,533,566 celeron's
1 BE6 with 300A celeron
1 BF6 with 333A celeron
2 Pine Mobo's with 800 celeron

Lots of memory too much to list but plenty to populate all the above boards.
Probably enough video cards to run them all, if not I will be very close.
Probably have to find a few more power supplies to finish the stack.
Network cards shouldn't be much of a problem either.
Hard Drives is where I'm most lacking here. I'm not sure where to locate older small drives at reasonable cost?
My plan was to build a wood enclosure for the stack. With the back open and a large floor fan to keep all the stuff cool. I won't need more then one keyboard , mouse and monitor. I will just move them as needed to the machine giving me problems. The back side of the Mobo's would be facing out and I can just plug in as needed.

My current setup is 4 separate machines the 533 and 566 celeron are in the BE6 and BF6 respectively. The 366 is in the Pine Mobo. But it is pretty much a waste there since it won't allow you to adjust voltage so it is only running at 550. And an old AMD K6 266 that really isn't worth running at all. All the machines use SETI Driver with SETI Spy tracking the results. Using Web Shots as my screen saver, and no it's not increasing work unit times at all. I was using a blank screen saver before and I noticed no degradation in performance when I made the change to Web Shots. All machines but the 266 are using Win98SE. I tried XP on the 566 and it was a disaster. Doubled work unit times. The 533 is OC'ed to 824 and the 566 to 860.

What I'm really looking for here is advice on how to configure this mess. The server idea sounds rather interesting with disk less machines running ram drives. But loss of data seems like a concern. If someone was interested in helping with these details I might consider putting the stack together.

Billl

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:12 pm

well bill

one thing most of those boards wil probably do 2 seti WU's per cpu per day and some a little more

there is only one way to use a windows environment without using harddrives.. and thats network booting

how exactly you do that im not totally sure.. i know it works sometihng like each machine loads the OS from one main machine which is the server.. other than that i have no idea on how to set it up

all of those old boards would be awesome to get crunching

just build you a wooden shelf unit and lay em all in there and get em crunching

i know several people with smaller drives.. uallas5 sent me a couple as well to use

you can never find small drives when you need them

InactiveX · Post by **InactiveX** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 12:32 pm

I've got a load of small drives if you're interested. Most are between 100 and 300 MB.

I am in UK, and they're free to anyone who pays postage.

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 11:51 pm

inactiveX sorry

i can't use any 100-300 mb drives.. too small to attempt to run a stable OS on them

linux maybe if i knew enough about it..

i've run win98SE on a 270MB drive.. it was not very stable

Billl · Post by **Billl** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 4:07 am

I think win 95 would fit just fine on the bigger ones you have Inactivex. How many do you have? SETI runs just fine on 95.

Billl · Post by **Billl** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 4:10 am

Oh yea and Kuun the 533 and the 566 are currently doing 3 per day easily. Both are OC'ed into the 800's. 366's at 550 and above should do about 1 in 16 hrs or so. A dual should be able to average 3 per day.

InactiveX · Post by **InactiveX** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 6:02 am

Right there are (in no particular order):

Quantum Maverick 270MB
Conner CFS210A 210MB
Western Digital Caviar 212MB
Seagate ST3144A 120MB
NEC D3756 105MB

Probably not much use but they are up for grabs.

We need to create "SETIOS" or a specialised slimmed down Linux distro.

Shame there's no DOS commandline.

24seven · Post by **24seven** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 8:52 am

InactiveX wrote:We need to create "SETIOS" or a specialised slimmed down Linux distro.

Im sure that wouldnt be too hard, slackware live is only 193mb and that has Xwindows and KDE installed.
Oh and just rememberd there is zipslack as well.

You could even run it off a cd, and have seti installed on the hard disk so that it can write to it, then if it goes wrong all you need to do is reboot and its all fresh again.
This would also help with maintaining the farm, as there would be less to go wrong.

David

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 10:32 am

kuun wrote:inactiveX sorry

i can't use any 100-300 mb drives.. too small to attempt to run a stable OS on them

linux maybe if i knew enough about it..

i've run win98SE on a 270MB drive.. it was not very stable

How 'bout good old MSDOS 6.22 using the command-line version of SETI?

headseed · Post by **headseed** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 1:17 pm

Even though the client is command line it won't run on MS DOS. It needs windows for memory management and all that.

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 2:04 pm

headseed wrote:Even though the client is command line it won't run on MS DOS. It needs windows for memory management and all that.

Figures. Oh well, you learn soemthing new every day! Thanx!

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Thu Jan 22, 2004 12:55 am

ok guys

i got an update

the p2 slot 1 mobo and a 350 cpu that i got from uallas5 DO work

the 350 is currently clocked at 233 >:| but anywho..

ialso have a slot a mobo that i got from a buddy at work and a slot a 700mhz CPU that i picked up months ago and they are currently attempting to install 2K