Linux cluster stuffed in an Ikea filing cabinet

People have been stuffing PCs in all kinds of things they don't belong in for a while now, but this Linux cluster creatively packed into an Ikea Helmer filing cabinet might be the first time we've seen furniture actually modded into a useful case. Sure, it looks like an ordinary filing cabinet, but it's packing six machines with Intel Core 2 Quad processors on Gigabyte S-series mobos with 8GB of RAM each, allowing it pump out 186 Gflops -- enough to complete a render job that takes a 2.66Ghz quad-core Mac Pro nine hours in just 64 minutes. Yeah, that's quite a filing cabinet. Hit the read links for tech specs, instructions, and updates on Helmer II.

[Via Make]

[roro2210 @ May 30th 2008 6:33AM]

SHIT that must heat up a lot

[hottuna @ May 30th 2008 6:49AM]

Sage
Old news.

[Louis Sacock @ May 30th 2008 6:51AM]

Shocking - 6 quad cores are faster than 1 quad core :P

It's an impressive feat, but I'd like to know how much it'd cost as well as how badly that bad boy heats up a room...

[halooooom @ May 30th 2008 7:45AM]

it says on one of his pages (http://helmer.sfe.se/HelmerDataSheet.pdf) $3500 and apparently runs quite cool.

[peshue @ May 30th 2008 11:49AM]

What's impressive is it's price compared to the mac pro. Although the mac still has a kick ass case.

[y3k.nik @ May 30th 2008 6:59AM]

So, the guys had enough money to buy all that money but not enough to buy a normal case for all that expensive machinery?

interesting how the economics of all of this works

[nebulus @ May 30th 2008 7:05AM]

You show me a case that can take 6 motherboards!!

Actually its quite a cool solution, nice and compact compared to 6 boxes, and I'm guessing has wheels so its easy to move round and can in the winter be used as a roaming radiator that doubles as an powerful mini render farm...

[zoara @ May 30th 2008 9:02AM]

I buy money all the time

[peshue @ May 30th 2008 11:48AM]

He should've gotten rack mounts, it would've been way easier. But it would've limited his choices alot.

[geothermalcat @ May 30th 2008 3:06PM]

lmao@the reply to "I Buy money all the time"

[maty @ May 30th 2008 7:00AM]

Or for £300 you could get a PS3 which runs at 204 GFLOPS and install Linux on that... ?

[Technex @ May 30th 2008 7:04AM]

Shutup, you fail.

[maty @ May 30th 2008 7:10AM]

What I asked was a question/suggestion, not a statement.

Left your questionmark-reading skills back at school?

[technophobe @ May 30th 2008 7:44AM]

You can't just put a question mark on the end of a staement and turn it into a question.

That is just bad grammer?

[maty @ May 30th 2008 7:48AM]

The intelligable asnwer I was after was whether this would work better or worse and how this might perform in comparison taking cost into account, as I'm not a fluent guru on these things.

I wasn't after unintelligable answers. And yes, actually, you can.

Smart people need only reply now. Thanks.

[BloodyGerman @ May 30th 2008 8:53AM]

Rated at 200GFLOPS, but do any real programs ever managed to reach this ? Folding@home manages to run 20-30 GFLOPS on a PS3. Is it possible to reach more?

You can get much higher with GPUs, nearly in the TFLOP region, but anyone ever wrote a program to utilize all this power. It seems to be more complicated to program GPUs.

Actually i think his attempt for Helmer II will be 6*PS3, because he claims that it will have 12TFLOPS, which would be about 6 times the rated 2TFLOPS for the PS3 GPU (which seems inflated to me). Besides Sony doesn't allow PS3 GPU access. Can't think of any other solution how someone could reach (rated) 12TFLOPS at this price.

[Crazylink @ May 30th 2008 7:01AM]

This doesn't seem all that impressive now that we're seeing high end video cards pumping even more information.

[kal326 @ May 30th 2008 10:02AM]

Indeed 4x 9800GX2 and CUDA FTW

[601210 @ May 30th 2008 7:35AM]

I'm guessing it can run doom.

[maty @ May 30th 2008 7:43AM]

Depends if Wine supports it or not; afterall, its a Linux system!

[Andir3.0 @ May 30th 2008 8:29AM]

There is a Doom for Linux...

[Graying Bozo @ May 30th 2008 7:37AM]

>>> ...might be the first time we've seen furniture actually modded into a
>>> useful case...

About 30+ years ago I bought a 2 drawer file metal cabinet from the equivalent of K-Mart, cut a couple holes in the back and mounted some Radioshack fans, and placed a humongous non-switching powersupply in the back of the bottom drawer and an S-100 motherboard in the front of the drawer. Built a front panel plate to allow switch between 8080/z80 mode, reset, run/stop, etc. I think you'll find a lot of folks did something like that back then.

[ITRanger @ May 30th 2008 8:27AM]

I hope his electrical safety wiring is good.

My leg is always resting/knocking/kicking against the underdesk filing cabinet. I'd hate to get a nasty shock ...

[barry99705 @ May 30th 2008 9:52AM]

He keeps it in a closet. This was posted on hackaday on April 23. Slow news day?

[maff @ May 30th 2008 8:40AM]

9600GSOs FTL!

[tim @ May 30th 2008 8:54AM]

I hope the Xbox 720 is this powerful or even more hopefully.

[Pochi @ May 30th 2008 9:44AM]

I'm just hoping they don't call it the XBox 720.

[Earl Jr. @ May 30th 2008 8:52PM]

xbox 1080?

[tanooki2003 @ May 30th 2008 9:09AM]

this is actually month old news. Try a little better at keeping with the pace Engadget

[polvadis @ May 30th 2008 9:58AM]

I'm pretty impressed with the ingenuity of this kid. You gotta give him some props on taking on the project to begin with, and then on actually getting it to work to his advantage.

I'm sure his second rendition, or the Helmer II as he calls it, will be a big improvement over the cardboard covered box.

[Matt @ May 30th 2008 10:58AM]

Does anyone have a good answer as to why 24 CPU cores is better than, say, 24 GPU cores? It seems like a few graphics cards would run circles around an x86 type CPU at rendering 3D... that being their intended purpose and all.

[Danny @ May 30th 2008 11:54AM]

Yeah, It might run circles around an x86 CPU, but the CPU will run circles around the GPU when it takes to calculate PI faster than a CPU.

Every piece of hardware does it's part. Now the PhysisX, and who knows, we could be needing even more compontents :P

[barry99705 @ May 30th 2008 1:59PM]

Because the last time I checked Maya doesn't use gpu's to render. Most professional 3D applications don't use gpu's to render.

[Matt @ May 30th 2008 2:13PM]

I guess I don't understand why Maya and "most" other pro softwae can't harness that graphics power. AutoCAD certainly does, and BIM is dependant on it. Why are the others not using graphics cards for what they are good at... rendering 3D?

[Wormbolt @ May 30th 2008 11:05AM]

Does it have a touchscreen?

[Joe Anstine @ May 30th 2008 12:49PM]

6 quad cores is 6. why?

[LC @ May 30th 2008 1:13PM]

The funny thing is; A single $200 GPU could render things faster.

[monkey @ May 30th 2008 7:33PM]

@Matt

Its happening, slowly. There's gelato by nvidia (GPU accelerated renderman style renderer), bunkspeed, mentalray offloads a tiny portion of its work to opengl, and both pixar and ilm have interactive lighting tools based on the GPU, the pixar one is rumoured to be included in the next commercial release.

uptake has been slow, studios can't retrofit gpu's into their 100+ render farms. wait a few years...

[scottbell @ May 30th 2008 8:41PM]

Seems to me like using 1U PSUs would be a better use of space.

[Jonathan @ May 30th 2008 11:27PM]

something i'd like to see is an extension of this, with two filing cabinets, one with all the boards, etc, and the other one with the power supplies, etc. and just route the wiring from one cab to the next...i reckon that'd be pretty cool.

[Napalm @ May 31st 2008 12:52PM]

Holy old news Batman!

[mat @ Jun 8th 2008 9:11PM]

thanks monkey, appreciate that. yes matt, almost none of the rendering programs, 3ds max, maya, etc use gpu's to render. it is just not how they work at the moment. gpu's are simply to display and use during working, but when it comes to render, it is all cpu and a good amount of ram. and yes, luckily gelato is trying to get more mainstream, and inteligently use the gpu during rendering in combination with the nvidia quadro cards. take a look.