Building a Folding Farm
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Have a spare computer? Have several? If you participate in Stanford University's distributed computing program Folding at Home (F@H), you might want to consider building a "folding farm" or, in my case, a “folding garden,” since I am going to farm out only two processors initially (it was going to be three, but one motherboard died during the writing of this article, so I am down to two). This article is the first of two parts.
In this article, we are going to build a "diskless" farm, where the only hard drive will be on the farm server platform. The rest of the units will boot off the server across a local network.
What we will need
The farm requires a server, which will have a disk drive and two Network Interface Cards (NICs), a small hub/switch/router with enough ports to handle the number of branches to be farmed, and a number of branch (or client) machines, each with a NIC. Each machine needs to be able to boot from the network (to save on resources, namely hard drives), which means either the NIC is bootable, there is a floppy drive to set up the network boot, or (possibly) you have an IDE-Compact Flash (CF) converter and CF card to do the same. We will need a keyboard and monitor for the setup only; the machines will remain "headless" once we complete the process.
The software we are going to use for our farm today will be the Damn Small Linux (DSL)-based Fold-Server. This is a Linux OS with minimal overhead that will run the FAH5.0x-Linux.exe console program, which we will download separately from Stanford's F@H main site. This is by no means the only farming software out there; Overclockix, a popular farming OS, is Debian-based and runs the FAH5.0x-Console.exe client for Windows under Wine (a Windows emulator). The reason for that is because in earlier times, the Linux and Windows clients were compiled using different development software, resulting in the Windows client running faster, even under Wine, than the Linux equivalent. The 5.0x clients, however, are built using the same Intel compiler and don't have that problem. Additionally, by using a native console as opposed to one running under an emulator, I'll have a little more available RAM and a few more clock cycles to fold with.
The farm server will need to be able to connect with the Stanford servers to upload and download Work Units (WUs), which is why I am using two NICs in the server, one of which will connect through my home network to the Internet.
Our farm will consist of a PII 233MHz server with 256MB RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. The branch units will be a Pentium II 350MHz motherboard and a P3 666MHz each with 256MB RAM. The network cards will all be 3Com 3CR990-TX-97 bootable NICs (I got ten for $25, shipping included, off eBay).
The farm will be networked using a 3Com eight-port 10/100Mbs Ethernet hub, powered by the 12vdc rail of the server's power supply. With only three of the eight ports being used, I will be able to add five more branches later, as I get them.
Next: The Setup >>
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