HELIOS
HEllenic LInux hOmebuild
Seti cluster
or
how to make many little penguins listen to the stars
My interest in the SETI@home
started in 1999 when i saw a report about the project on CNN.
Little i could imagine at the time that this project would grow to become the biggest
destributed computing effort on the planet till this day, and the starting point
for my exploration of the stars and super-computing.
HELIOS is my hands on learning experience on Linux, clusters and recycling of
old PC's :-)
In the true spirit of the Linux community i am documenting all my efforts to
help the people who want to create something similar
And last but not least a great thank you to all the people who have helped in
creating this project
Vagelis Kapsalis, for his advise and some of the original equipment,
Emilio Kiriakakis for the web-space,
Spiros Rentoulas for the good prices on the lan cards and the switch :-)
The people from the seti@home message board
How things got started
I was crunching seti@home wu's (work units) for about 2 years and i have seen several people that
created seti clusters or farms and had stats that i could only dream about.
Then one day i decided that i could build one, just for the fun of it.
The idea
The idea behind HELIOS was a simple one. Try to build a LOW COST seti processing
cluster. The key word here is "Low cost". To be really low cost such a
design required to be able to work with a minimum configuaration
(motherboard,cpu,ram , lan card, no hard disk) and use a free operating system in order to
avoid licences.
So Windows was out of the game and there was an additional reason
One restricition imposed originally by the equipment at hand was that it
consisted of obsolete machines (P100-150, PII 200 etc with ram from 16 to 64 MB
at best) which made it almost imposible to work with Windows.
So as i found out Linux was the only way to
go, which created the problem that i did not know anything about Linux..
The project got halted for quite sometime as i had to travell
extensivly for work.
Later i got 8 dual boards from Ebay to use as the main engine
for HELIOS.
My original though was to use only dual cpu systems in order
to conserve space and resource (one power supply, lan card per board etc)
At that time the price for a P3I@1Mhz was around
180$ which was way above what i could spend to build the cluster (some easy math
16 cpus X 180 = 2880 ). So i decided to get some low cost Celerons and as the
price of the P3 would eventually come down replace them. Well this would have been
the cases provided that Intel did not decided to make the P4 actually
cheaper than a P3...
After getting the motherboard and CPU's my friend Spiros Rendoulas provided the switch,ethernet cards, power supplies.
And then the fun begun...
What you need
Server
! pc with at least 32MB ram (64 MB recomended) to act as the server
A 2-6 GB hard disk for the server
2 lan cards for the server
Clients
Working PC's with at least 16MB ram
Lan cards with boot rom support
Photos
Click on a photo to get a high resolution one (approx 250K each)
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I would like to dedicate this work to my late father, Spiros who is looking to
us from the stars
