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2. Hardware

This section covers the hardware choices I've made. Unless noted in the known hardware issues section, assume that everything works really well.

Hardware installation is also fairly straight-forward unless otherwise noted, with most of the details covered by the manuals. For each section, the hardware is listed in the order of purchase (most recent is listed first).

2.1 Node hardware

32 machines have the following setup each:

32 machines have the following setup each:

32 machines have the following setup each:

32 machines have the following setup each:

32 machines have the following setup each:

2.2 Server hardware

Two servers for external use (dissemination of information) with the following setups:

2.3 Desktop hardware

1 desktop with the following setup:

2 desktops with the following setup:

1 desktop with the following setup:

2 desktops with the following setup:

1 desktop with the following setup:

1 desktop with the following setup:

2 desktops with the following setup:

2 desktops with the following setup:

2 desktops with the following setup:

1 desktop with the following setup:

3 desktops with the following setup:

2.4 Firewall/gateway hardware

1 firewall with the following setup:

1 gateway with the following setup. The gateway is a mirror of the firewall in case the firewall breaks.

2.5 Miscellaneous/accessory hardware

Backup:

Monitors:

Printers:

Keyboards/mice:

2.6 Putting-it-all-together hardware

We used to use KVM switches with a cheap monitor to connect up and "look" at all the machines:

While this is a nice solution, I think it's kind of needless. What we need is a small hand held monitor that can plug into the back of the PC (operated with a stylus, like the Palm). I don't plan to use more monitor switches/KVM cables.

Networking is important:

2.7 Costs

Our vendor is Hard Drives Northwest ( http://www.hdnw.com). For each compute node in our cluster (containing two processors), we paid about $1500-$2000, including taxes. Generally, our goal is to keep the cost of each processor to below $1000 (including housing it).


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