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I finally got around to dusting off all my extra comps (save the box of laptops) and clustering it all up. Time was still an issue, so I simply used the bootable CD distribuation “BCCD” (bootable cluster CD). It’s quite handy. After booting, I had 7 working nodes, 1 desktop, 1 file server, 1 RAID array, and 3 non-working nodes. All on 1 UPS. ALl on one socket.

Woops.

Things were running fine fore a few days before I ran any apps, ie with load averages of 0.01. I though that it would be good to test how the temperture rose after 24 hours of cpu use. So I hacked up a little perl script to hog CPU, and launched it 7 times. I looked at the CPU use histogram… It slowly migrated out across the nodes, until went the UPS. went the circuit breaker. went the lights.

I suppose it makes sense, but I previously didn’t realize how much more power a running CPU pulls than an idle one.