[Beowulf] Mobos for portable use

[Hamilton, Scott]

The Little FE portable HPC cluster might be of interest on this topic.  It is an HPC system build with small form factor motherboards to get a 6 node Beowulf cluster that can be powered off a standard 110 receptacle and used as a training system in public schools as it can be run in the classroom.  The boards they use are not power house boards, but the size of the cluster would make it possible it a battery pack to run a backpack Beowulf cluster.  Their website is www.littlefe.net<http://www.littlefe.net>

Scott

Scott Hamilton
Solution Architect II
Atos Big Data & Security - NAO
(573)324-7124
scott.hamilton at atos.net<mailto:scott.hamilton at atos.net>

From: Beowulf [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of John Hearns
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2017 9:35 AM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Mobos for portable use

Jim,
I am a big fan of the Xeon-D but they take 45Watts for the CPU alone. Full featured Xeon and two 10gig ports on board though.


I would be looking at one of the Nvidia boards intended for in-car systems.



________________________________
From: Beowulf [beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] on behalf of Lux, Jim (337C) [james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov]
Sent: 19 January 2017 14:36
To: beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: [Beowulf] Mobos for portable use
This comes up every few years..
Someone at work was complaining at lunch that the latest laptops have nice screens but don't have much memory, largely because they want to keep the battery size reasonable ("thin is in").. my suggestion was "well, why don't you just use your laptop as the user interface to a bigger more powerful compute node/nodes"
That devolved into a "but what I really want is the horsepower of my desktop machine"..

Leaving aside the "use the network to connect to a CPU somewhere else"

We then started discussing whether anyone makes motherboards with high performance processors, lots of RAM, maybe a GPU for computation (but no display hooked up), but none of the other stuff, and then run off batteries..
Like a battery powered Intel NUC, but with way more horsepower
The top of the line NUC seems to have a 19V, 65W power supply..  arstechnica says they burn about 50W running full out.   Let's say you want to run for 4 hours, so you need 200 Whr.

A 18650 Li battery is 3.4 Ah @ 3.6V, that's about 23 Wh, so you'd need 9 of them.  That's not all that big a package.. Arranged in a row, they'd be 65mm by 162 mm..

Prismatic (brick shaped) batteries are 350 Wh/Liter, 135Wh/kg.. so 200 Wh is going to be about half a liter (50x100x100 mm) and 1.5 kg





James Lux, P.E.
Task Manager, DHFR Space Testbed
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive, MS 161-213
Pasadena CA 91109
+1(818)354-2075
+1(818)395-2714 (cell)

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