Diskless BOINC Farms

[Bender10]

Lagu,
I don't think there will be an increase in speed running diskless. I'm just back on my kick of building an inexpensive 'Cruncher'. There should be a small power usage reduction also.

This is not new. There have been 'diskless' seti/other farms around for years. This approach is just real easy IMHO, to setup and manage.

If this will parallel (it should) the performance of a well stocked computer (maybe OC'ed a little ), why buy all the extra crap. If I (we) can purchase a cheep ($15) CD, Motherboard, dual core CPU, Ram and a case w/ psu for ~$350 (X2 4800) and crunch away, Cool!! True, the price of HD's is way down...

Of course, if you want to build the best and baddest, that's great too.

But, I don't need to play games, surf, or whatever on a cruncher...That's what my 1 expensive box is for.. And If I want to give the 'diskless' computer away in the future, buy a HD and OS of the day and voila...

[Lagu]

Ok, understand

[jmblazek]

If I (we) can purchase a cheep ($15) CD, Motherboard, dual core CPU, Ram and a case w/ psu for ~$350 (X2 4800) and crunch away, Cool!!

Howdy Bender!

I still keep tabs on your progress and look forward to your latest results. I know this isn't your goal right now but as you know, you can save another $15 for the CD if you can successfully implement PXE/BOOTP network boot or booting from a USB stick.

That puts total costs around ~$335 which is ever closer to the $300 threshold.

Keep up the good work!

p.s. I'm also curious about the wattage used in your diskless system. Here's a list I got from TigerDirect. I don't know how outdated it is...if anyone cares to update it, that would be great!

Component                Wattage Required 
Motherboard                    15-30 
Low-End CPU                    20-50 
Mid To High-End CPU            40-100 
RAM                            7 per 128MB 
PCI Add-In Card                5 
Low To Mid-Range Graphics      20-60 
High-End Graphics              60-100 
IDE Hard Drive                 10-30 
Optical Drives                 10-25