Assembling the parts

So the parts were assembled at my old office at CS Bldg 345. On Dr T's advice, I took a couple of pictures to explain what I did. As I hoped, everything fit into everything else just fine.

The only thing that did not fit were the humongous Tesla C1060s donated by NVIDIA. Notice in the image below that the cards themselves are a neat fit, but one of the two PCI-Express power cables they need are at the end of the card, which is blocked by the hard disk bay.

Thankfully, the hard disk bay was removable.

But that leaves me wondering where to put the hard disk.

The floppy drive bay seemed like a snug fit. But it was a third of an inch too wide. And there were these twisted pieces of metal digging into the hard disk's plastic sides. The first thought that came to my mind was duct tape.

But I'm not a fan of duct tape solutions. It's messy and leaves icky residues. So it's either scotch tape, or superglue... superglue it is!

I used very little amounts on the tips of the hard drive plastic. Enough to hold it in place, but still easy to pry out with a gentle wedge.

So here are the final pictures of the innards of the system. And we have FOUR of these babies... :D

Notice the little GeForce FX 5200 PCI graphics cards hidden behind the Teslas. This little bugger gives us some major trouble afterwards.

As you may know, a graphics card is required for any system to POST. The Teslas are not valid graphics cards since they do not have any output ports. They are only computing devices. This is why we needed at least one PCI graphics card per node. I'll discuss the problem with the 5200s in another post.

Ordering the parts

Click here to view the wish list that I created on Newegg.com before the parts were ordered. Newegg is usually nice about keeping these wish-lists available forever. But just in case you can't access the link above, here are the items that were purchased for the cluster -

4x Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80601920
4x MSI X58 Platinum LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
8x G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-4GBNQ
4x PC Power & Cooling S75QB 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI NVIDIA SLI Certified (Dual 8800 GTX and below) CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
4x Rosewill R5717-P BK 120mm Fan ATX Mid Tower Computer Case, with mesh air filters, adjustable vents & Tool-Free kits
4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
4x LITE-ON Black SATA DVD-ROM Drive Model iHDS118-04
4x EVGA 128-P1-N309-LX GeForce FX 5200 128MB 64-bit DDR PCI Video Card
4x GENERIC GENC-502MU03 3 ft. Cat 5E Black Network Cable
1x Acer X223Wbd Black 22" 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor
1x IOGEAR GCS14 4-Port MiniView Compact KVM Switch Kit w/Cables
1x D-Link DGS-2208 10/100/1000Mbps 8-Port Desktop Green Ethernet Switch

As you can see, I took a risk with the newly released X58 chipset from Intel. The motherboard model we ordered (manufactured by MSI) seems finicky... almost as if they rushed it through development and straight into production. The BIOS already has a v1.1 and that's what we got straight from Newegg. Also note that the X58 supports triple channel memory, but we could only afford 4 sticks per mobo. There are 2 remaining memory slots though. So there's room for a future upgrade.

Also, I regret buying the DVD-ROM drives when the DVD-Burners were actually cheaper because of a free shipping offer. This was right in the middle of the holiday season and there were plenty of better online offers coming up every hour. I wish I could have just been given the budget and done the ordering myself. But anyways, this is what we have, and so far, things look good.