The Crunchy Hog of TPR .....

Distributed Computing Projects Crunchers Cafe
1

Cutting a long story short, on Tuesday morning of this week I had a bit of a drive over to Cambridge, to go to the home of the Hog, the house of the late BobW from the forums.

http://forums.teamphoenixrising.net/showthread.php?t=6646

Unfortunately, it would seem that 18months+ of the hog being sat in the garage has taken it’s toll on the hardware. If you remember that the hog consists of 24 beautifully assembled micro atx boards with xp1900 cpu’s and 128Mb ram. Well two solid days of testing and I’m finally coming close to the end point.

Consider this first, the hog being all the setup, a litter being a setup of eight boards, and a piglet being a single instance :lol:

So far, testing has not been good, there is a pile of PSU’s that can’t power a low level system, a load of ram and then the real sickener of 20/24 boards that do not post with known good parts in them :cry: :cry: So far, CPU testing has resulted in 6 good, 6 left to test. I’ve not even started on the hard drives in earnest, 8 of them are good for sure - two of them are updated to sp4 and are about 10% through a Seti unit :woot:

So what now, I have an office full of PC bits, a fantastic racking system for microATX boards. Part of me still wants to get a litter running for TPR, and I can place it into the server room and it just get left there to do it’s thing (crunch). So I think, what is good I’ll eek out as much dosh as possible on ebay, and put what I get towards 8 microatx boards to ltsp boot, so probably an am2 3800 or thereabouts. I reckon that’ll probably match the combined total of the hog when first assembled.

The Hog will return, I’m just no sure what to put into it at the moment, the LTSP appeals again, as it did for me before. But then, a disk and an OS means a dual core is easier to get running … At least there is one thing for sure, it has a place to run as I’ve spent a fair amount of time negotiating that side of things, in anticipation that things would be more successful.

I’ve a load of pics on my phone of the process of testing - at the moment I’m shattered and pretty down with the failure rate being so high. I so wanted to get some of Bobs stuff crunching for a CrunchyHog seti account :smiley: - in fact I still do, I’ve got a crunchy hog domain ready and waiting to put some funky live crunching stats from the hog onto as well :cry: :cry: best laid plans.

DT.

2

/wipes away a tear
/feels old

I remember it well, alas… maybe we could get some small donations to “chip” in if you’ll pardon the pun :wink:
muti-core def seems the way to go for max crunchability.

3

The hayday of classic seti crunching and the hog and MAJOC’s own crunching monster on the job…ah. :slight_smile:

4

DT I have lots of 250w PSU’s not brill but would run one of bobs crunchys also got a good 10 sticks of 128meg ddr ram if it would help get some of that lot up and running again… and std size boards that those xp1900 can go in.

cant run anything myself but your welcome to the boards/ram/psus for £0 if you can make £££££ for getting running stuff together or ebay flogs? and then convert to modern stuff.

  • heatsinks / lowspeed nics / cheapo naff vga cards

basically all that stuff I had for doing the same thing which fizzled out due to other priorities.

5

all the boards are toasted, only 8 cpus work, was 9 but one just fizzpopped on me in my working board.

I think it’s a start from scratch job - which is not a light decision to make. The racking and the hard drives are usable, the psu’s maybe be it would be a lot nicer to have the modular cheapo ones for ease of working/cooling.

Two days ago I had such high hopes :cry: :cry: :cry: now I’m looking at how much the ally heatsinks weigh for the scrap metal merchant

DT.

6

On basic terms, there were 24 boards in the original and they were basically all the same judging by the picture. Could we source a shed load of the same spec of suitable parts and ask the Team to either buy one job lot per unit each (1 mobo, cpu, ram,HD,etc), or just pool money into a pot and ask DT to buy the necessaries.

Would a suitable supplier be willing to do a deal for a piece of sponsorship on the stats site?

7

I have matx boards and chips here, AMD Sempron 3100s and Athlon X2 3600s, probably about six in total = ten cores. Any use? Will need RAM (DDR) and heatsinks, processors are OEM. Think about it and let me know.

8

Wierdly enough i’m just breaking what was left of my old farm, might be able to help out with bits too.

Good to see you making the effort DT :nod:

9

Out of interest, I wonder what the reason for kit failing is. Moisture? Dirt? Bugs?

10

Wow, i saw the pic of it !

But what do you do with all that space/speed/ram ?

11

Oh yeah , If you dnt wanna tell it its ok :wink:

12

I’ll have a pint of what your on

13

I truly wish I knew, I’ve tried some compressed air on a few, I think it is possible a few of the boards work, I’ve just got to bring myself to go through them all again, done a memory test, a cpu test and a psu test. A lot of the boards show signs of corrosion on the backplate connectors, so that’s an issue. The failure of so many of the cpu’s I’m putting down to heat, I think before they were turned off the air con may have failed, or the machine that he had running the aircon on demand from a thermostat on one of the boards was turned off. Yes, you read that correct, there was a circuit with a thermostat directly on the boards linked to an air con unit power socket. The machines all have partially completed seti units on them (classic) as well, suggesting a heat crash.

A good nights sleep after tonights football (and a few beers) should give me a clear decision flow without so much emotion involved.

DT.

14

right, I’ve got the rack all ready, just wanting some nodes :slight_smile:

Good psu’s all ready, good hd’s all ready, permission to run seti and host in the building here sorted. I think work is shall be populating one ‘litter’ of eight piglets, a real meeting on hardware expenditure this afternoon :xfinger: That ‘litter’ will be KVM setup as well as it’ll be our test cluster.

Beneath that, there is a level for a TPR crunch only set of kit, I’ve a globalwin802 case here that I’ll buy the kit to make a ltsp server to sit in that to run the TPR Hog. We are pretty confident of being able to roll our own dual core ltsp kernel as well.

So may I suggest that those who do wish to contribute in any way to a resurrection of the Hog get to the LAN party at the end of April :smiley:

DT.

15

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?id=20800#

general thoughts on a combo like that - or rather 16 of them ??

DT.

16

That looks perfect for your setup. Good price too!

17

[QUOTE=DoubleTop;415360]http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?id=20800#

general thoughts on a combo like that - or rather 16 of them ??

DT.[/QUOTE]

is that dual core?

just seen this combo for £10 more, dual core…
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?MBB-AM366M

18

LE-1600 = 2x2.2 GHz 1MB cache
X2 3600 is?.. ambiguous from novatech’s site but seems to be slower and smaller cache, and more power hungry.
Edit: trying to verify if the LE1600 is actually dual core or not… ccl doesn’t match up with elsewhere
Edit2: looks like only ccl say the le-1600 is2x2.2 GHz, no one else suggests it is dual core.

19

amd’s own site states that the le 1600 is dual core. I’ll find out on Monday, the components individually from ebuyer come in cheaper - so they are not installed and tested, big deal.

I’ve ordered one before I decide for sure to populate the hog with this setup, so I guess we’ll find out on Monday :chuckle:

DT.

20

[QUOTE=DoubleTop;415373]amd’s own site states that the le 1600 is dual core. I’ll find out on Monday, the components individually from ebuyer come in cheaper - so they are not installed and tested, big deal.

I’ve ordered one before I decide for sure to populate the hog with this setup, so I guess we’ll find out on Monday :chuckle:

DT.[/QUOTE]

Hmm, it’s definately single core - I must have misread or looked at the wrong one. OS is installing now :slight_smile: A result on the delivery, the first stop of the courier was here :woot:

DT.