Topic: Attempting to make a crunch farm

[Zee]

Greetings Gentlemen (and Ladies),

I am considering making a crunch farm.  What do I mean by crunch farm?  I currently am participating in the distributed.net (www.distributed.net) OGR-25 competition.  

Since I have some spare cash laying around, I want to basically build a OGR-25 farm that will help in cracking OGR-25.

The issue regarding which processor to chose was made fairly instantly.  Since AMD series of processors have a superior FPU unit when compared to their Intel counterparts, I had no qualms about chosing an AMD cpu.

I am aiming at initially 20 nodes.

My configuration will be as follows.

Micro ATX fully integrated motherboard (SOCKET A) with LAN/VID
64MB SDR or DDR
AMD Duron 1.3 Ghz Retail Box
250W Powersupply.

I would like to employ diskless booting.

Could anyone tell me if LTSP will work on e-smith.

Also, will a physical boot rom chip be required, or will the motherboard just automatically boot via LTSP?

[steve]

Is not the Duron similar to the Celeron, in that it does not have all of the cpu cache and takes a performance hit compared to the 'full-version' of the processor??

I would go with Athlons myself, but I'm no expert.

steve

[Zee]

Your assumption is correct, but also incorrect at the same time.

For distributed.net OGR the main requisite is a powerful FPU.  Memory bandwidth, or cache size make no effect on the scores.

Since the core of the Duron and Athlons are identical sans the cache size and cache set associativity, the scores for OGR are nearly identical on an equally clocked Duron and an Athlon.

For example a Duron 1.3 Ghz cracks at 9,564,440 keys per second


by contrast

An Athlon 1.3 Ghz cracks at 10,080,179 keys per second.

Not a very big difference at all really.

[Patrice Alday]

My answer isn't really related to your question, but:

The use of a 250W Powersupply may damage your board if 3.3V is about 14A.

On 3.3V must be a minimum of 22A for an XP1800+, i don't know how much power a 1.3GHz Duron/Athlon needs but it can't be much away from the 1800+.

The problem will be that the units on the mainboard (i don't know the english word for it) which change the voltage will burn out sooner or later because of trying to take the missing power from 12V and your powersupply can be damaged too (luckily this was my case, luckily because it's only the powersupply not the mainboard).

Excuse my bad english!Zee wrote:
>
> Greetings Gentlemen (and Ladies),
>
> I am considering making a crunch farm.  What do I mean by
> crunch farm?  I currently am participating in the
> distributed.net (www.distributed.net) OGR-25 competition.
>
> Since I have some spare cash laying around, I want to
> basically build a OGR-25 farm that will help in cracking
> OGR-25.
>
> The issue regarding which processor to chose was made fairly
> instantly.  Since AMD series of processors have a superior
> FPU unit when compared to their Intel counterparts, I had no
> qualms about chosing an AMD cpu.
>
> I am aiming at initially 20 nodes.
>
> My configuration will be as follows.
>
> Micro ATX fully integrated motherboard (SOCKET A) with LAN/VID
> 64MB SDR or DDR
> AMD Duron 1.3 Ghz Retail Box
> 250W Powersupply.
>
> I would like to employ diskless booting.
>
> Could anyone tell me if LTSP will work on e-smith.
>
> Also, will a physical boot rom chip be required, or will the
> motherboard just automatically boot via LTSP?

[Dean Mumby]

ltsp will not work on e-smith

you have 2 choices download their fiull iso's and you will have a working ltsp server ( it is based on redhat 7.2 or 7.3) or install your favourite distro and install ltsp on that . I have done it on baoth redhat 8.0 and mandrake 9.0 and it works great.

Dean