Greetings!

I'm contemplating building a farm to run Rosetta. I've got plenty of space, and power, and I think I have a few sources of used old computers that I can lay hands on for pretty cheap.

I've got a decade or so of experience in building and fixing computers, so I know my way around "under the hood." I even know a wee bit about networking them..

That being said, however, building a farm is probably the most ambitious project I've attempted. So, I'd like to ask the community here if they have any tips, pointers, or links to some good "how-to" pages or books or whatnot. Any and all help will be appreciated.

Thanks much,
Druegan

Well depending on the hardware you're running, you might want to consider running linux?

I'm currently writing a how-to install a minimal linux OS on a box for it to run rosetta and nothing else, feel free to email me if this would be of any interest to you.

- trib'

\tribaal**(AT)%%tiscali(dot)fr\
(remove the punctuation and replace the words in brackets by their equivalents @ and .)

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Well, I'm not entirely sure what hardware I'll be running, to be honest.

Most likely it's going to be "whatever I can get" to begin with. I'm definitely interested in running Linux though, although I have *very* little experience with it. 2 main reasons for the choice: 1, I don't think Windows will run effectively on hardware as old as some of this is likely to be, and 2, I seriously can't afford 100 or so licenses for a Windows variant.

So yes, your how-to would be *most* welcome. Email is forthcoming, and thanks!

-Drue

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Well depending on the hardware you're running, you might want to consider running linux?

I'm currently writing a how-to install a minimal linux OS on a box for it to run rosetta and nothing else, feel free to email me if this would be of any interest to you.

- trib'

\tribaal**(AT)%%tiscali(dot)fr\
(remove the punctuation and replace the words in brackets by their equivalents @ and .)

Will the how-to be posted online somewhere?

it would be nice to have one for all to see
perhaps the commnity can help make it better and simpeler so everyone with a old machine will be able to setup a cruncher.

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Member of the Dutch Power Cows

Trying to get the world on IPv6, do you have it? check here: IPv6.RHarmsen.nl

Yes I will post that howto online as soon as it's finished. I have horribly long days however, so that might be only in a couple of weeks.
I'll try to write it in the most userproof language, so most Linux gurus should avoid reading it, I'll write lots of inepties ;)

If people are interested in helping me out (testing, eventually wikifying the article?), let me know at the above mentionned email adress.
Technically, my howto is about installing Debian Sarge (not exactly the latest around but very stable), doing a netinstall, and booting from floppies.
Yes, I know, you can burn a bootable CD and it's just better yadda yadda, but I plan to test drive my how-to using my mum as a user, and she doesn't want to switch the boot priorites in the BIOS...

Plus the floppy drives are really common, even on really old systems, and pretty robust. Last few installs I made with this set up, the CD drive wouldn't work...

Cheers,

- Trib'

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Yes I will post that howto online as soon as it's finished. I have horribly long days however, so that might be only in a couple of weeks.
I'll try to write it in the most userproof language, so most Linux gurus should avoid reading it, I'll write lots of inepties ;)

If people are interested in helping me out (testing, eventually wikifying the article?), let me know at the above mentionned email adress.
Technically, my howto is about installing Debian Sarge (not exactly the latest around but very stable), doing a netinstall, and booting from floppies.
Yes, I know, you can burn a bootable CD and it's just better yadda yadda, but I plan to test drive my how-to using my mum as a user, and she doesn't want to switch the boot priorites in the BIOS...

Plus the floppy drives are really common, even on really old systems, and pretty robust. Last few installs I made with this set up, the CD drive wouldn't work...

Cheers,

- Trib'

perhaps a guide which covers both floppy and CD would be nice
I have seen many machines with floppy drivers that have died

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Member of the Dutch Power Cows

Trying to get the world on IPv6, do you have it? check here: IPv6.RHarmsen.nl

you might want to consider network booting as well, so you don't have the expense, running costs, noise and maintenance costs of hard drives (except in a server machine)... I'd think it'd be worth investigating - BitSpit at XPC used to run quite a few diskless nodes, and I think he wrote a guide at some point too... will have a look for it later.

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I think you'll want to review the article in the Wiki called "How To Control BOINC On Remote Computers". I personally still haven't had time to play with that. There is also an add-on product called BOINCView which is for "Windows Only" I believe. Again, I've not had a chance to try it, but I understand it allows easy control of remote machines.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

All of your ideas are great.
I guess I'll just paste my work in a wiki somewhere, so I can let you guys add stuff to it. My original idea was just to document the method I used (which is why I chose to write about netinstalling with floppies), but I guess we could make something better out of it if it included netbooting, netmanagement n'stuff :)

Anybody know where I could paste my howto embryo (some place like a BOINC / rosetta wiki)? Maybe we shouldn't link to it before it's consistant, however, I don't want people to be disappointed because it's under construction...

- Trib'

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Tribaal, I'm probably not much help here but after Paul Buck left the projects someone else took over the boinc wiki site. I forget who it was. I don't know if he works the Rosetta project or not but definitely runs SETI. I wish I could remember who to contact about it but surely someone else reading this will remember. Barring that, you would have to just scour the SETI forums.....

Druegan, how many machines are you considering putting into your farm? There's a good thread about this topic over in SETI forums. If you don't run SETI and have not earned credit you cannot post there except for the Q&A forum but you can still read everything.

There was a post I read in SETI forums (I think) a few weeks ago about a guy that had about 30 or 35 machines in his garage. He built a 3 tier shelf system to house all the boxes and used some sort of gadget so he could run them all from one keyboard and monitor. If I remember correctly the consensus arrived at there concluded that currently machines with about 1,000 mhz processors were the most economical when considerations of crunch time/$$$$/and power usage were taken into account.

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Founder of BOINC GROUP - Objectivists - Philosophically minded rational data crunchers.

There's also descriptions of how to setup farms/pharms at Folding@Home and a number of the larger DC team forums. The last time I looked for information on them - I googled "headless crunchers" and got a few helpful links. "Headless" referring to no monitor plugged into the motherboard.

At work, I have 5 systems running another DC client; all have their own case, keyboard, and mouse. One has a permanent monitor, the other 4 share a manually plugged in monitor.

The headles cruncher articles show even more minimalistic systems - where the systems don't have a case - and only have a harddrive sitting beside the motherboard. And even more minimialistic, where each set of motherboards share a power supply, and there's no HD present. (For projects where all the data can be held in memory.)

I was going to try out a set of headless crunching motherboards, but opted instead for upgrading my main machine to an AMD x2 3800+. I'll try and track some of the links down, and you can see what's been down before, and decide which options are applicable for your setup and comfort level.

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Right, my goal was more to make a step by step howto to install a minimalist yet easy to set up system to make the machine a 100% time crunsher/folder, and to control it via network (ssh for the time being).
I used that technique to set up 8 machines (oldies) at work, and wanted to mke it available to people with outdated or under-specs machines (most of the cpus I scavenged at work are less than 700Mhz, and have around 126 Mbs of RAM).

My goal was not really to set up the most competitive farm, but rather to set up something usable from old stuff, with minimal hassle.
Like something you could hand out to your little cousin who doesn't know anything about linux, so that he can crunch some more with the antique sitting in his room :)

Couple of people around me recently asked me what they could do with their old PC, and I got them interested in Rosetta... so this sounded like a logical step, to me.

- Trib

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There was a post I read in SETI forums (I think) a few weeks ago about a guy that had about 30 or 35 machines in his garage. He built a 3 tier shelf system to house all the boxes and used some sort of gadget so he could run them all from one keyboard and monitor. If I remember correctly the consensus arrived at there concluded that currently machines with about 1,000 mhz processors were the most economical when considerations of crunch time/$$$$/and power usage were taken into account.

It'd definitely be worth it if we could put together a table of difference CPUs comparing their power consumption and rosetta outputs, core by core. I started one a few weeks ago, but didn't get very far. If it was an interactive one it could be filled in quite quickly though.

I'd expect the tualatin cores to do quite well for budget CPUs as they only use ~ 22W*, and obviously the Athlon64 venice core's are very efficient at around 30W (I think).

Here's what I started: http://www.extremedc.net/rosetta/CPUs.htm

It'd need some extra fields such as estimated BOINC rating, potential headroom OCing, and price. I think that could be a good starting point for building cost effective and energy efficient crunchers.

especially the Celeron 1GHz which you can generally turn up to 133FSB and run at 1.33GHz with very minimal cooling.

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Run over here http://forums.teamphoenixrising.net/forumdisplay.php?f=29
and look at the sticky about setting up diskless farms. Several of us are always glad to help on these forums to get even a novice operational. I think the member Mojo has the largest farm, today but a single server machine can run upwards of 30 machines depending on the I/O load and the network configuration.

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Even if Diskless/headless crunching is not right for you - a lot of the other farm/pharm info may prove helpful. Using RealVNC to control other machines on your network, for example. Balancing mobo&cpu cost vs performance/watt.

TechIMO
MauiSun
FaH's forum on Farms, headless and diskless setups

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If anyone knows about Farm Manager (part of Account Manager) which should (hopefully) go live with boinc 5.4 (which is soon to be released btw)
You may want to look into that.

Also don't really worry about VNC etc as you can control boinc via it's RPC interface directly (either BoincManager, BoincView or similar can do this)

I believe Account Managment/Farm Managment should help simplify you control and setting up.


Other than that your basically just installing linux on them all (anything will do really). Networking them together so they can have internet access and you can control them all from on place. Of course you'll be begging for an auto-update-boinc client software option when new versions are released ;-)

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Team mauisun.org

If anyone knows about Farm Manager (part of Account Manager) which should (hopefully) go live with boinc 5.4 (which is soon to be released btw)
You may want to look into that.

Also don't really worry about VNC etc as you can control boinc via it's RPC interface directly (either BoincManager, BoincView or similar can do this)

I believe Account Managment/Farm Managment should help simplify you control and setting up.


Other than that your basically just installing linux on them all (anything will do really). Networking them together so they can have internet access and you can control them all from on place. Of course you'll be begging for an auto-update-boinc client software option when new versions are released ;-)

Can you explain Farm Manager? sounds like you would be able to control everything that has to do with Boinc on the machines running Boinc or something.

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Member of the Dutch Power Cows

Trying to get the world on IPv6, do you have it? check here: IPv6.RHarmsen.nl

Can you explain Farm Manager? sounds like you would be able to control everything that has to do with Boinc on the machines running Boinc or something.

This is a good start: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/acct_mgt.php

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Greetings!

I'm contemplating building a farm to run Rosetta.

Any and all help will be appreciated.
Thanks much,
Druegan

Druegan,
Below is a link to an older Seti@home thread about Boinc farms and such. They have some pictures and things as well. Not sure how much real knowledge you will be able to get from it, but it should give you some ideas/thoughts, I believe.

Link to thread.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

Joel

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Can you explain Farm Manager? sounds like you would be able to control everything that has to do with Boinc on the machines running Boinc or something.

This is a good start: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/acct_mgt.php

Is there someone who created such a farm manager? Or should I just stick to BoincViewer

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Member of the Dutch Power Cows

Trying to get the world on IPv6, do you have it? check here: IPv6.RHarmsen.nl