Improving the cooling of the EGLOBAL S200 computer

When I set up my Personal Compute Cluster composed of EGLOBAL S200 computers (affiliate link), one of the first issues I noticed was that the CPUs would overheat when all 12 threads on the CPU (2 threads per core) were being ran at 100% load. This disappointed me about the S200 computer as it was otherwise perfect for my use case. So I set up to find a way to improve the situation. The first step is to be able to measure the CPU temperature by installing lm-sensors, which is a utility that allows you to read the CPU temperature. To install it on all machines in the cluster: Then you need to log into each machine in the cluster one by one and installation the sensor software by running: The software will try to detect the various sensors that the computer has. Accept all the default options as the software presents them to you, even if there is a Read More …

Building Out Nodes for Personal Cluster

Its time to build the cluster. I have all the parts described for my cluster in my prior post, and today’s goal is to get the computers set and fingered as described in my cluster network design. This is a rather long post as I cover both hardware and operating system set up. At the end of this process, we will have a cluster of computers that is ready to have application software installed. I suggest building all the nodes first before starting with the operating system installation. Before you get started with these steps, I highly recommend that you start the download for the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Server installation ISO. Note that the EGLOBAL S200 computers couldn’t use the live install ISO for some reason, but everything worked just find with the alternative (or old style) Ubuntu installer. You can download the latest version of that installer here. Select the “64-bit PC (AMD64) server install image” version. Cluster Node Read More …