[Beowulf] Q: Cooling units? Raised floors? General machine room stuff..

[Suvendra Nath Dutta]

With good advice like this, you have to give recommendations! What 
brand work bench do you use? This is quite important for me as we have 
no service agreement. I fought hard to have a "temporary" ramp put in 
up the steps to our cluster room (with a raised floor). But without a 
good work bench it would be useless.

Suvendra.

On Jul 2, 2004, at 10:03 AM, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Jim Lux wrote:
>
>>>   Finally, what other suggestions do people have for equipment 
>>> needed?
>>> On my list we've got the UPS, the AC, thermal sensors and 
>>> killswitches,
>>> APC Masterswitch units, power lines, network lines, web/video camera 
>>> and
>>> an alarm.  Anything else people find useful?
>>
>> Coat rack to hang some jackets on.
>
> Work bench.  A nice one, with rechargable screwdriver and bit set,
> various hand tools, good lighting, a network drop or three, a small KVM
> and flatpanel video/keyboard, screw/part organized storage, a rack to
> hang spare cables on -- you get the idea.  Even if you get top shelf
> service agreements on everything, you WILL be working down there
> prepping nodes to go in or out, replacing failed drives on out of
> warranty systems, and so forth.
>
> Comfortable swivel/rolling work chairs to match the bench, and if you
> are really into comfort, put a cheap workstation on your bench KVM
> (useful in and of itself) and add a nice set of headphones on a long
> cable to keep your ears warm, exclude room noise (likely considerable),
> and let you listen to that 20 GB ogg collection we know that you've got
> squirrelled away somewhere while working...;-)
>
> A phone.  One with a really loud ringer or even a blinking light 
> ringer,
> if your AC is as loud as ours.
>
> He says as he prepares to descend into the bowels of the physics
> department to work in OUR cluster/server room... sigh.  Comfort is key.
>
>> When thinking about UPSes, etc.  consider partitioning your system so 
>> that
>> not everything dies together.  Your monitoring and head node 
>> computers might
>> want a longer duration than the compute nodes.  (that web cam's not 
>> going to
>> do much for you if the power is shut off...)
>>
>> A temperature/humidity recorder is nice to have.  It could be as 
>> simple as
>> an off the shelf weatherstation widget and a logging program.  It 
>> lets you
>> better manage your HVAC.
>
> Regarding AC units, there are some very lovely 10 ton and 15 ton units.
> Since a major component of your cost will be space renovation, and 
> since
> this will become MORE costly later as it will require downtime and dust
> on top of the mere dollars, you'll really want to TRY to engineer the
> space now for its eventual future peak capacity.  You'd also much 
> rather
> have too much AC than two little.
>
> You might want two 5 ton units instead of one 10, though -- that way 
> you
> have a bit of redundancy should one fail while you are still at current
> levels.  I agree with Jim, though -- talk to your HVAC contractor, they
> should be able to give you good advice here.
>
>    rgb
>
> -- 
> Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
> Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
> Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
> Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu
>
>
>
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