Comodity cluster design

Hardware selection: Probably the most expensive aspect of implementing a cluster. Careful consideration must be made over every aspect of hardaware selection. Balancing the requirements of performance with the limitations of power consumption, space and cooling.

A comodity cluster makes us of mass produced consumer hardware instead of specialist hardware, in order to acheive supercomputing performance at much lower costs. Ainkaboot add a couple more requirements in order to increase the efficiency of our systems.

• Motherboards must be small in order to achieve higher density of processors
• The processors must be optimised for power efficiency. In most high performance applications the purpose of the cluster is to spread the load across multiple computing elements. As such less emphasis need be placed on the individual performance of the node.
• The motherboards must contain the full required functionality

We find industrial motherboards to be one of the most effective for our systems, namely Mini-ITX, ETX and EBX form factors.

By removing the dependance of computing nodes on hard disk drive. Our nodes generally network boot. The power consumption is and heat in the node is cut. For applications requiring hard disk drives, such as database replication, the alternate slots have SATA II links which allow RAID 1 disk arrays to be linked to a processing node seamlessly.