I haven’t been posting much lately, most of my time has been sucked up by a variety of summer projects, both personal and school related, and most of them haven’t been terribly externally interesting or photogenic.
Several of the projects derive from the research group inheriting a heap of hardware from the departure of the last member of UK’s Cluster Fluid Dynamics group, which we are currently in the process of sorting out. One part of the heap is 30 little Dell SX260s (cute li’l SFF Pentium 4 boxes from 2003 or so), and some associated server and network hardware. I’ve spent a couple afternoons building and configuring a portable (ish) cluster from the pile, and the result is PIK (Pentium/Intel Cluster in Kentucky, following our current naming scheme):
And check out my OCD wiring job:
Unfortunately, six of the small nodes and one of the servers seem to be dead, all apparently due to bad capacitors… which is sadly entirely unsurprising on for hardware from around 2003. There is still a discussion if it would be worthwhile to replace the caps, it is apparently not too difficult on these motherboards.
On another front, I still haven’t managed to get my 500-some photos from Vienna sorted out; I think only a few of those will end up getting posted as they relate to other things — the urge to just shoot with a little digital and a large memory card creates a really unmanageable number of photos.
