Nice rack but can you do anything useful with those puppies?

February 11, 2008 12:30 PM

I have 9 HP LP1000r servers just sitting around and would like to put them to good use. Load balancing, render farm, folding@home, other suggestions? Details of our mini datacenter inside...

We currently provide a few different hosting solutions to some local small businesses in the area... web, email, application and backup. We have two 15/15 FIOS pipes that see very minimal traffic. Dedicated boxes for each of the services we provide and resources on those boxes very rarely exceed 50%. We do some video production on the side but nothing major.

Servers are primarily linux and OS X with two windows boxes thrown into the mix. Workstation-wise we're all macs.

We have 9 unused HP LP1000r boxes just sitting in the rack. What can we do with them??? Fun projects, useful projects, unique projects... I'm open to all ideas.

posted by hummercash to technology (8 comments total)

Beowulf + Folding@WhateverYouFancy
posted by Mach5 at 12:51 PM on February 11

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posted by General Malaise at 12:51 PM on February 11

Folding@Home or WCG (really they're just different projects; both use the "BOINC" infrastructure) are both good. I don't think it's necessary to make a cluster of the machines before adding them to the grid -- they'd be just as useful, perhaps moreso, as individual machines, because I don't think individual workunits given out to clients are easily parallelized.

If you wanted just the educational experience of setting them up as a cluster, I'm sure it would be educational. But once you have it set up, it's not going to be useful without something to run on it. Maybe you could ask a local university if they have any HPC tasks that they'd like to run? (Not that a 9 machine cluster is really that large by modern standards but perhaps some student will have a project they'd like to run but can't find machine time for.) I'd ask physics, compsci, and engineering departments; maybe a phone call to a couple of department chairs followed up by a note on company letterhead so they know you're for real. Of course, it may take a semester or two for them to come up with a program to run, if they don't have a project just kicking around waiting for a machine to run it.

Aside from that ... I'm not really sure. There are lots of things you can do with general-purpose computers, but without a problem that you need to solve, you may not really need them. Frankly I'd think about just unplugging them and saving the energy if you don't need them turned on and you're not going to use them for some sort of charitable purpose. Each one is probably at least a few hundred watts just at idle. Shutting them down is almost certainly the most environmentally sound thing you can do.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:34 PM on February 11

they're currently shut down actually... they've been that way for over a year.
posted by hummercash at 1:51 PM on February 11

Give them away on Craigslist/recycle? Any seemingly beneficial use of these machines would be offset by their slow high power use CPU's.
posted by SirStan at 3:25 PM on February 11

you could donate some bandwidth to tor
posted by sero_venientibus_ossa at 3:49 PM on February 11

I hate to spoil the party but why not keep them switched off and save the earth?
posted by rc55 at 5:18 PM on February 11

Can I have one?
posted by br4k3r at 11:50 AM on February 12