Q: Building a small machine room? Materials/costs/etc.

[Brian Dobbins]

Hi guys,

  Has anyone on this list been involved in the construction of a small
'machine room' for their clusters?  We're beginning to look at creating an
enclosure with an attached AC unit and, possibly, a raised floor.

  I've started poking around the 'net a bit, but was interested in hearing 
any experiences or tips from the people here.  Anything about materials to 
use, people to talk to, hidden costs to watch out for, etc.  The overall 
goal is to have a cool, clean, local systems 'room' for our computational 
facilities.

  As for specifics for size, that's unknown at the moment... perhaps, just 
for the sake of discussion, say 15' by 25' (by however tall we need, at 
least 8.5').  We'd like to plan for a capacity of up to 4 racks (w/ 32 
nodes each), plus a few miscellaneous desksides lying around.

  (While we do have a central machine room on campus, our network is 
isolated for security reasons, and additionally we tend to run GigE 
between our newest machines -even some desktops- and we certainly can't 
get that sort of throughput from the central machine room!  Thus, even 
though this might be costly, it may be worth it in the end.)

  Thanks for any pointers whatsoever!  It's much appreciated!

  Cheers,
  - Brian


Brian Dobbins
Yale Mechanical Engineering
------------------------------------------------------------------
"Be nice to other people.. they outnumber you six billion to one."

_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf