Parts Manifest

From LittleFe

Hardware of LittleFe (Nov 2006)

The hardware behind LittleFe grew out of our work building stationary clusters and our experience teaching workshops in a variety of places that lacked parallel computational facilities. The principle design constraints for LittleFe are:

• $3,000 (USD) total cost
• Less than 50lb (including the Pelican case)
• Less than 5 minutes of setup time
• Minimal power consumption

These criteria have led us to the current parts manifest of:

• 6 motherboards (mini-ITX or similar, 1GHz+ CPU, 512MB RAM, 100MB ethernet)
• 6 12VDC-ATX power supplies
• 1 320 Watt 110VAC-12VDC switching power supply
• 1 40GB 7200RPM ATA disk drive (2.5" form factor)
• 1 DVD/CD optical drive (slim-line form factor)
• 1 8 port 100MB ethernet switch
• 1 rack assembly
• 1 1610 Pelican travel case
• Fasteners, cabling, and mounting hardware

The total cost per unit is about $3,000 in parts and labor (about 10 hours of student labor to assemble and test). The motherboards, CPUs, and RAM comprise the bulk of the cost.

With all 6 nodes idling, LittleFe draws about 80 Watts of power (about the same as a light bulb). When running a CPU-intensive molecular dynamics simulation on every node, LittleFe draws about 88 Watts of power.