Garbage, fry grease, and Linux
In our 12 years of operation, we have built several supercomputers out of the discarded e-waste that people bring to us. On April 22 and 23, at MAKE Magazine's Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, we will be building one such cluster and powering it using our veggie-oil fueled generator. The pictures to the right are of our recent preparation for this event.
Hardware
The slave node CPUs will be entirely comprised of hardware that is brought to us for recycling during the event. For our master node, we will be using a dual-processor 1GHz Pentium III server that was previously donated to us by CNET. We're not yet certain what our minimum hardware spec for usable slave nodes will be, but based on our experience so far it is likely that it'll be Pentium II or higher, with 128MB RAM, and the ability to boot from either the network or a CD. To avoid problems caused by faulty RAM, we will bring a supply of pre-tested surplus 64MB DIMMs with us. Other components we'll have on-hand include CD-ROM drives, network interfaces, and cables.
Software
We are currently running a modified version of ParallelKnoppix, a GNU/Linux Live-CD that contains a number of clustering applications. We have added the POV-Ray 3D-renderer, patched for use under PVM, which allows individual frames to be split up into blocks and rendered in parallel by as many nodes as there are available. We've also modified the ParallelKnoppix scripts to make adding new nodes easier, and speed up the setup process. We will be releasing a patch for the scripts as well as a .iso image in the next few days.
Ray tracing is known as an embarrassingly parallel operation (meaning that it scales very well). Because our cluster is only using normal ethernet, this class of application is ideal for it. However, ParallelKnoppix includes the prerequisites for a number of other parallel computing applications which we will also run, such as the High-Performance Linpack Benchmark.
Feedback and suggestions are welcome; see our post in the ParallelKnoppix forum or email info at accrc.org.