A few days ago I get a letter from the student loans company, with final details of my loan to get me through university this year. Naturally, I have spent much of it on my computers

So I now have nearly all the parts for my nice new boinc farm in the post, which should arrive over the course of this week.

The farm in it's initial state will consist of 5 crunchers, all identical. Stats are as follows:

Motherboard: Asus M2A-MX
CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+
RAM: 1GB Crucial DDR2-667
Storage: 2GB Compact Flash (via IDE converter)

PSUs are not ordered yet - The plan is to measure the power usage of one of the nodes using the PSU for my main computer, so I can see just how much each of them uses.

Now as for storing these things. I first looked at getting cases for each of them, but I came to the conclusion not only would this cost a fair amount of money, it would mean they use up more space than needed. I needed to come up with an idea, which thanks to the empty paper tray on my desk I came to quickly.

I have now in the post 5 paper trays with standoffs. Each of these trays measure 260x345mm. a uATX board measures 244x244mm, so plenty of room.

Now these trays stack on top of each other, so hey presto - an instant computer rack.

So that's the hardware basically sorted, and I'm already planning on using linux on them all, so where does that leave us?

Well, names.

I always give my computers names, but I'm also always rubbish at it.
So I'm opening it up to everyone here at AMDUsers - come up with a name for each of the nodes! I also would like a name for the whole stack in general, if any of you are up to the challenge!

Now I don't mind what sort of names you come up with, but if you can provide a reason and/or background for the name that would be great. There is no lottery or anything, just post your ideas and I'll pick the 5 I like best

That's not the end of it either. While it's nice to have my head in the sky, running seti@home looking for ET, I also understand the arguably greater importance of doing work that will benefit mankind much more directly - thinks like medical research.

As such, I'm opening these 5 nodes up to 5 different projects - one project per node. (I will be actively monitoring them, so if a project goes down I can switch the node to something else quickly.)

Again, I have no preference as to which projects these are. So, I'm opening this up to AMDUsers as well!

If you have a favourite project, make a short argument for it, and I'll pick 5 of them.

Bonus points if you choose a project and name a node after something related to that project!

You basically have until the farm is fully up and running, which I estimate will be in about 2 weeks time.

And as promised, here is a picture for you all (don't worry, lots of pictures will come as the farm is built).



Good luck!