What do you do with old gear? Here is one way to have a little fun and create an interesting solution for High Performance Computing.

The CALC cluster packs the following -

-2.8 TB of on-board storage
-96GB of RAM
-GBE network with trunking capability
-48 CPUs 3.06 Intel
-30 min. of backup power
-Runs on 4 110v standard power outlets
-Requires no special cooling - Can run in office environment or anywhere. Even on a ship for on-board supercomputing needs.



The reason that vCompute built this portable cluster was to experiment with the inflexibility of current high performance clusters with respect to power, special heavy-duty cooling, etc...

After making an investment in Verari blades we realized that the technology was too bulky and too hard to cool. These blades, according to Verari management, required the Verari mega-dense cabinet which was very expensive and costly to operate. I retired the gear within a year of purchase as it was too costly to operate. The Verari design was poorly conceived and was wasteful in terms of Energy consumption and cost to operate.

A friend of mine, who had a talent of packaging things, suggested we build a cabinet ourselves and design it with portability, efficiency and self sufficiency in mind. We then took off on the road of thinking about a design. We wanted to show the industry that clusters can be cheap to operate and portable. We also wanted to recover the cost of the Verari gear. We looked into selling the gear but the blades would only bring about 150 dollars each on ebay as no one seemed interested in Verari technology.



This is the sweet part. Most of the parts used to build this unit came from Home Depot and Lowes and Fry’s, see below:

-- 5 Shelf Cart: Lowes
-- Cart Wheels: The Container store (support 300 pounds per wheel)
-- Raw Aluminum Stock: Home Depot and Lowes
-- Blade Frame/Guides: Lowes: Screen Door Frames: Used for guides for the blades
-- Bolts/Nuts/Washers: Home Depot
-- 22 - 60CFM Fans on the bottom of the blades : Electronic Parts Outlet
-- 18 - 84CFM Fans: Fry’s: on the top of the blades.
-- Plexiglass: Home Depot. Used to seal top of the blades for air flow control
-- Bridge Rectifiers: Electronic Parts Outlet: Convert 110/AC to 48/DC for lower fan assembly
-- Surge Protectors: Electronic Parts Outlet
-- UPS: Fry’s
-- 1U Blade Server: which serves as a keyboard holder: Old Stock
-- 24 Port Gigabit Switch: Dell
-- Cat-6 Cables: Directron
-- 48 CPU coolers: Dynatron
-- Tie Wraps (lots of these): Walmart and the "99 cent only store"



We decided to name the beast CALC-1 which is an acronym for Cluster Al La Cart. What is really interesting,look for the pun, is the fan assemblies. A row of fans on the top of the blades and the other on the bottom: This is called a Fanwich. Get it.... Cluster a la Cart with a fanwich on the cart???? Oh well. The fanwich moves about 3000 CFM (cubic feet per minute) of air through the blades. The Dynatron blowers keep the CPU’s nice and cool and force more air across the blade. The heat dissipation increased 70% above the Verari Mega-DenseRack and with this design we decreased our cost power and cooling by 88%.




The whole CALC-1 consumes about 26 Amperes of power. The actual computer hardware is described as follows:
Each blade is configured as:
-- Dual Processor Motherboard
-- 2 x Xeon 3.06 GHz Processors
-- 4GB ECC registered 3200 memory
-- 120GB 7200 RPM EIDE Drives
-- 400W Private Power Supply
-- Dual Ethernet Gigabit Interface
-- USB 2.0 Compliant
-- IPMI Daughter Card
-- PXE Bootable
The head node is configured as:
-- Dual Processor IU server
-- 2 x Pentium IV 3.06 Processors
-- 1GB ECC registered Memory
-- 120GB SATA 7200 RPM SATA
Drives
-- 400W Private Power Supply
-- Dual Ethernet Gigabit Interface
-- USB 2.0 Compliant

Oh... I need to mention that the whole cluster operates on standard 110 volt power... about 4 curcuits without any special cooling needs.

We currently have Rock Linux running on all of the nodes.
The nodes are loaded via PXE...in other words, all of the client nodes are booted with some DHCP magic from the head node who listens for bootp requests. Since the head node is instructed to boot from any MAC address, it does so. Viola’ you don’t need any floppies or cdrom units on each client blade (called the hive)




This unit sold immediatley. It's current tasks is to run seismic jobs. It is running Landmark Graphics seismic applications and it is very fast and reliable. The latest result that we received is that it performs faster than a 64 node cluster that has been used in the past. In other words.... It rocks!!!! So now our clients want more built and who knows what this one will look like? Anyone have any old Verari blades hanging around?

It has been a while since I posted here on my blog. We have been very busy lately positioning the company for the next five years.

This month on September 23rd we reached our five year mark. The last five years have been challenging and interesting to say the least. We have gained a new level of understanding on what is required to survive and thrive in the compute on-demand industry.

This year has brought us new opportunities to impact areas of research in fields such as weather prediction, molecular modeling, medical research, and much more. I have found these areas rewarding as they benefit humanity and impact quality of life for many. Super Computing in many aspects can lend way to major advances in many fields and can accelerate the technological advances within our society.

Out of all the projects we have seen cancer research is one of the most important to me and is a priority I have set for the company. Over the last several years I have personally lost 3 family members and most recently one of my oldest and dearest friends to this disease.

I have watched people suffer from Cancer without hope and have seen the devastation it leaves behind with those who have lost loved ones. Something must be done!

vCompute is currently providing resources to Compute against Cancer http://www.computeagainstcancer.org/

Due to our efforts cancer patients benefit as we directly support cancer research conducted by organizations such as National cancer Institute and National Human Genome Research Institute. vCompute will continue to support these organizations in hopes that our compute resources will assist to gain better treatments for cancer and hopefully a cure.

Our efforts with our client in Japan to provide predictive weather services for the seas surrounding Japan has also been a rewarding effort.

vCompute is assisting a Japan based company to build a weather forecast system that allows users to view forecast data graphically. We use data from NCEP and distributed the data through both mobile phones and pc based web internet.
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The data generally available was not focused close to shore. The wind data grid was 1 degree by 1 degree and the wave data was 1 degree by 1.25 degrees. vCompute facilities allow them process close to shore data with a finer data grid mesh.

They use the WRF (Weather and Research Forecast) a mesoscale numerical weather model. This model allowed them to take the synoptic GFS data from NCEP and produce a mesoscale forecast with a 10km grid mesh. Also, they produced a .25 degree grid mesh wave forecast of the north pacific. The mesoscale wind shows a better forecast of when the winds near shore will change.

The vCompute cluster is being utilized to perform the following:
1. Process a mesoscale weather model (WRF) 4 times a day. The current area of processing is the central Japan area and our goal with this system is to expand to cover the entire Japan area.
2. Process an ocean model (SWAN) 4 times a day. We have two areas of processing. The outer grid includes the north pacific. The inner grid includes the Sagami-bay area in Japan. We want to expand the inner-grid to cover the entire Japan area

Our client sent us this testimonial and I wanted to include this -
"We searched for providers in Japan and the cost of housing our cluster or renting a cluster was really high. So we searched outside of Japan and found vCompute. vCompute met our requirements 100% and more. The service and expertise received so far goes beyond our expectations. And with this, we feel confident that vCompute will not only help us with our cluster needs but also aid in expanding our business."

These types of testimonials make all the effort very rewarding. As we look ahead to the next 5 years I see us moving in interesting directions as we establish our credibility in the various markets. We anticipate additional steady growth as we navigate this uncharted market and strengthen our relationships with our vendors and clients.

One of the major differences you will see with vCompute over the next five years is our commitment to apply our computing resources into more medical related computing. Fields such as Cheminformatics, Medical Research, Health Sciences, Computational Biology, Genomics, Proteomics, Pharmacogenomics, Pharmacogenetics, Cheminformatics, Medical Informatics, Rational Drug Design will become some of our largest market segments.

The areas of scientific research such as space sciences, climatic modeling, aerospace, molecular modeling and cosmology will continue to be pursued as well as government related processing such as internet intelligence, defense and alternative energy efforts.

I am looking forward to the next five years as we continue to apply our resources to improve the quality of life for people worldwide.