Editor’s Note: We at Welsh Icons have in the past been known to make light of certain issues. At the top of such an article you will find that we have tagged it as humour. In this case we are being deadly serious.
Welsh Icons sound man and ‘techie in chief’, Mark, has been building a supercomputer in his shed in a quiet Cardiff suburb for the past few month.
He told us:
“The gist of the “Free State Supercomputer” (or “No Fit State Supercomputer” is that its a bunch of old Xboxes that nobody wants, scrounged from garages, backs of wardrobes and under beds, with their ROMs reflashed with a free open source BIOS called “Crowmell”, which then boot from a Hard disk, (but this is better removed to save power and make less noise/heat) CD/DVD-ROM , or over the LAN from a bootp/tftp/nfs server (also using a modified XBOX) using a Linux kernel modified with patches to support the xbox’s buggy hardware (Xbox patch), OpenMosix, and compiled with support for running root filesystem on NFS. This gives basic NUMA-over-LAN functionality.”
At this point our eyes started to glaze over. He continued:
“It is also possible that each of these modified “node” machines can also have a hard disk installed, which can be exported as a block device, which is then used as part of a distributed RAID array from one or more nominated (but not necessarily dedicated) file servers.
“This makes for a very resilient system, especially when there is a good geographic distribution of process nodes, disk nodes (which can also be process nodes) and fileserver nodes (which can also function as disk nodes, process nodes, etc.) A well designed system would take quite a few air strikes to knock out.
“It is also possible to modify the power supplies of simple process nodes to use even less power, if they have no disk/optical drives.”
Luckily even though we had fallen asleep we’d left our tape recorder running.
Mark added:
“OpenMosix works quite transparently, unlike many other “Beowulf” type systems, in that a program is compiled to fork multiple threads of repeated time consuming code to run in parallel. OpenMosix will then automatically migrate forked processes from busier nodes to less busy nodes.
“A small system of perhaps 250 hacked xbox’s plus boot server and system console, could return substantially better than 150 GigaFLOPs depending on the aptitude of the coding, live on improvised, or cheap-shop modular shelving in a garden shed, be powered from single phase mains, and keep a flock of carrier pigeons warm in winter.
Finally Mark excitedly told us that there was a possibility of building such a system using discarded PS3s when the new Beowulf release becomes available.
He told us:
“This will return much better results again.
“BTW I have actually done this on a small scale, with four normal AMD Athlon based PCs. Ray-tracing using a modified POVRAY at blistering speed. Got a short video sequence I rendered on it somewhere.”
At this point our arts director and video bod Norris Nuvo started to listed and realised we could start to render some of out video work in near real time rather than have to leave a room full of equipment chugging away overnight just for a few seconds of footage.
So there you have it. If anyone has an old Xbox they’d like to donate to the project, please contact us at our normal address and we will pass your details on to Mark.
