Bulding a pc cluster

[oulton]

Has anybody done this? I am looking into the idea of building a cluster of around 10 quad core machines, as I reckon I could easily do it for cheaper than your standard 12 core 24thread evga xeon setup would require....

What networking issue would I have for say parallel processing with scripts? How would I setup my storage etc etc?

Cheers

 

[weird_dave]

Power consumption will be higher since you'll have 3x the PSUs and motherboards etc... than the Xeon route. It might be worth calculating how long it will take the extra power consumption to use up the £savings.

Networking issues will depend on what you're trying to achieve. Same with storage.

Need more info

 

[flippant]

I was using 6 separate boxes for network rendering, but it was a lot of hassle.

Not sure what you're trying to achieve, but with distributed rendering I had all sorts of issues with one machine going down and taking out the rest, also 6 power supplies at between 500w & 750w is a killer for the electricity bill compared to a single 1200w, never mind 10.

Add that to the fun of multiple KVM switches etc I gave in and went for the 12 core 24 thread setup.

Also takes a lot of room. On the plus side you'll be able to turn off the central heating.

 

[Reaper 392]

are you doing the kind of computing that could be done on the cuda cores of an Nvidia card?

in the right circumstances a couple of decent graphics cards will blitz a decent cluster

*edit*
if you need it for raw computing power then take a look at the FASTRA II (although that might be a bit OTT considering your looking at 40 cores, rather than hundreds)