26-core Q9650 SuperComputer - Overclock.net

oliverw92 · 07-09-09

Hey guys,

I've just got back from a University taster course at the University of Southampton in the UK. It was called SuperComputing in Engineering.

I thought I would show some pics of the set up we built. Each node is an acrylic sunbeamtech case with a Zotac 9300-itx wifi, q9650, 4gb low-profile ram and an 80gb sata 7200rpm hdd. There were 6 nodes in total, with the black shuttle pc as the head node (awesome little thing, has a touch screen built in the front of it). We used the superpc to do some CFD (computational fluid dynamics) on aircraft CAD designs we had made.

After making adjustments to the planes, we then loaded them into the Uni's flight simulator and flew them. The flight simulator uses 3 pc's - a big main one, then 2 small ones for managing the other small screens showing controls and read-outs. The flight sim uses 3 projectors onto a curved wall. The cockpit has real fighter-jet seats, 2 hyper-sensitive joysticks from a JCB (much better than the ones actually designed for pcs) and a throttle rack from a real plane. The specs on the main computer: i7 965, 12gb Corsair Dominator ddr3, 2x GTX 295, Cosmos S, 1x Intel 80gb SSD (has windows and flight sim installed on it), 3x 500gb 10k rpm in RAID0, x-fi titanium, all watercooled (don't know what with).

THe silver cubes you can see in the pictures are also expensive. i7 920, Asus Rampage II GENE, 9800gt, 12gb ddr3. They have at least 50 of them in the engineering department o.0

The course was great. We built the nodes, connected them up, ran some CFD on them, then built our planes on the i7 cubes and then ran them throuhg the superpc. The course was instructed by 2 guys from the microsoft research institute at southampton uni. BOth of them do multi-box world of warcraft (one of them uses a supercomputer of around 20 nodes for it

). We also had a video conference with the head of microsoft research cambridge and got to meet the deputy managing director of Microsoft HQ UK, Reading. Yes, i did ask as many annoying and difficult questions to them as possible :P

So here are some pics and a video.

The screen above is a 42" Samsung LED worth around £4k. I hooked up our i7 workstation to it and played some flight sim on it. It was awesome!

I may be able to get some more pics from the microsoft guys (i have the email address of the deputy directory guy lol)

Just thought OCN might be interested

Daney · 07-09-09

Wow, amazing.

But why have 12GB of RAM with a 32bit OS?

Bats · 07-09-09

Why oh why, do you have 12GB of RAM, and a 32-bit OS?

oliverw92 · 07-09-09

Dual boot. A program called EnSight (used for CFD) won't work on 64bit. THey dual boot 64bit and 32bit.

[pi] · 07-09-09

I bet it folds like a beast.

skatingrocker17 · 07-09-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bats

Why oh why, do you have 12GB of RAM, and a 32-bit OS?

I noticed that too. You still got some cool stuff there though.

oliverw92 · 07-09-09

Lol funny you shoudl say that, i asked if i could try it but they said no. I was thoroughly disappointed.

Side note: I was talking to one of the postgrads there who was helping us. She is working on using a GPU as a cpu, in particular working on ATI (another postgrad is working on nVidia CUDA). She has a goddam 2GB ATI FireGL V8650 PCI-E (x16) 512Bit GDDR4 sponsored to here from ATI! £2k! And when FireGL 3 comes out, she gets a new one one of those too.