New Gigabyte Motherboards
New ABIT motherboards
References and Related Info
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Aug 2003 Monolith upgrade
After two years of service it was time for an upgrade. Monolith was
upgraded to Athlon XP's @2.2 Ghz with 1 GB oF DDR400 Ram on Gigabyte
Nforce2 ultra 400 motherboards. It was difficult getting parts purchased.
Vendors were swamped with orders and finding good vendors that take
purchase orders and had the motherboard I wanted was difficult. I finally
got them in on Aug 4. Over the next two days we upgraded the hardware and
operating system. The BIOS on some of the mobos had to be upgraded, the
hard drives had to be erased, and the modules for the onboard NICs had to
be compiled and installed. On Aug 7 the cluster went live. On the 9th
one node had crapped out and had to be treturned.
July 2001 New Motherboards
After scrapping the Tyan boards and getting ABIT KT7A Athlon motherboards we
have had no problems with them. We got the parts for nine new nodes.
Richard assembled them. We had many problems getting these up. First
we purchased 3c905c ethernet cards. The origanl nodes had 3c905b cards
and worked fine. Our version of Scyld did not support the 905c so we
had to yank 905b's out of other machines. Also in one
node the HDD power wasn't connected, which was easy to fix. Another had a
bad floppy drive, again easy to fix. Then the last four nodes would not work.
They would boot off the floppy, get the kernal from the master, and
then have kernal panics or eth0 errors. We thought it was bad NICs.
Richard got some more 905b's and they had the same problems. It
turned out to be bad PCI riser cards in the 2u cases. Also the
eighth and final tyan board broke in a regular desktop case. The
cluster went live on July 26.
June 2001
All the motherboards but the one in the 4U server have broken. We decide
to abandon Tyan s2390 and use Abit Kt7a's in all the machines. We will
upgrade to 16 nodes with Athlon 1333s. We also got a dual Athlon setup.
Tyan says the board will work in a 1u case so we think it'll be allright
in our 4u server case, but Scyld failed miserably to work on it so it will
be used for developement running RH 7.1 until a version of Scyld works on
it.
May 2001
Two more nodes go down. Tyan refuses to admit problem. Bought two Abit
Kt7a to replace the two. We got the APC smart UPS 2200s and two more
Atlas 10k II 36GB HDDs.
March 2001
Tragedy! Three nodes go down. Cpu fans don't work when plugged into cpu
fan header. Sent boards back to Tyan to be fixed.
Nov 2000
Richard put together the original eight machines together. They have
Athlon 1100s on Tyan s2390 motherboards.
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