BillytheImpaler said:
I'd definitely go for the P4 option so that she could be pulling QMDs. Need it be so serious with all the rack mounting and jazz? Stompy was just regular ATX mobos in a stack. I know magman's had a tough time maintaining the inner nodes becasue they're hard to access but it seems easy to me to just lay the mobos on a shelf. Put rollers on the shelves so they behave like drawers and you're in business.
Actually, the StompMonster layers at Chez Magman have been rackmounted for a long time. I now have a 19" rack in my garage which houses Stompy's layers, my server, a UPS and a few of my own layers.
Here's a link to a page I just set up showing some of what Stompy now looks like.
Stompy Photo's
I've been reading through the other comments above and have a few thoughts to throw into the discussions as well.
First, you will have to take into account the running costs for the new cruncher ("Stompy II", "Son of Stompy", or "Stompy! the Reincarnation" perhaps). With 16 layers each putting out over 100 Watts of power, you have something in the order of a 2kW heater running 24 hours. Apart from disipating this heat, you also will have 40+kW Hours of electricity costs to pay for somehow. This can be mitigated by not going for the cheapest PSU, try finding one with PFC and an efficiency greater than 80% if possible. A more efficient PSU will easily pay for itself in a very short timeframe.
One possible solution is to distribute Stompy, 4 hosts with 4 layers each for example (this seems very apt to me a distributed distributed cruncher), though this would mean having 4 boot disks rather than one. This option would also considerably increase the resiliance of Stompy II.
There have been some mention of different heatsinks. There is a very practical limitaiton on the size of the heatsinks due to the promposed layering of the crunchers. The taller the heatsink/fan combination, the fewer layers you can fit in a rack. For this reason, you can't use some of the better price/perfomance heatsinks such as the Arctic cooling range as they are normally quite tall.
One final point. Chossing a MATX (or even Micro ITX now) board is a good choice from a space and accomodation point of view, but I haven't found many MATX boards that are good overclockers as yet. Most Manufacturers pigeonhole MATX boards at the media centre or low cost part of the market, it is normally enthusiast boards that have good overclocking options.
That's all for now, but I will no doubt comment more as the discussions progress.
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