Monday, July 1, 2013

The Mini-ITX cluster proves forever popular

Over on Mini-ITX.com, the right border of the popular site shows the most viewed content that day. Fourth on the list is a blast from the past, from February 2004, the build of the 12 node mini-cluster, powered by the VIA EPIA V8000.


The write-up of the project is no Dan Brown novel, so it must be the content that has people visiting so much some nine years later. Or maybe it's just that it looks so darn cool!

"I built a Mini-ITX based massively parallel cluster named PROTEUS. I have 12 nodes using VIA EPIA V8000, 800 MHz motherboards. The little machine is running FreeBSD 4.8, and MPICH 1.2.5.2. Troubles installing and configuring Free BSD and MPICH were few. In fact, there were no major issues with either FreeBSD or MPICH. The construction is simple and inexpensive. The motherboards were stacked using threaded aluminum standoffs and then mounted on aluminum plates. Two stacks of three motherboards were assembled into each rack. Diagonal stiffeners were fabricated from aluminum angle stock to reduce flexing of the rack assembly."

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