Supercomputers - The cheapest route.

[drgr33n]

Couldn't find an appropriate section to post this so thought experts forum suited best ??

I've now started tinkering with OpenCL and decided to build myself a supercomputer for as less money as possible. I've noticed there's a lot of interest in pyrit on these forums these days and I think parallel computing is going to play a big part in pen testing in the foreseeable future.

I'd love to hear what setup you guys are running and at what cost !! Also are any of your guys bitcoin mining ?

Anyway after crawling the net here's what I came up with. I thought I'd post it as I thought it might be useful to someone else.

PSU

Alpine 650W Quiet Silent PC Power Supply PSU Black Red £16.00

Motherboards

Asrock ALIVEXFIRE-ESATA R3.0 AMD AM2+ Motherboard £34

or

SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY PURE CrossFireX 790X - AM2+ / AM2 Socket - AMD 790GX Chipset

Memory


Crucial 4GB PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL6 240pin DIMM £25

Processor

AMD Black Edition 7850 - AMD Athlon X2 2.8 GHz Processor £32

or

AMD CPU AM2+ 9850 Phenom 64 Quad core oem AM2+ 940 PIN £49


GPU's

SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY Radeon HD 5850 Xtreme - 1 GB GDDR5 - PCI-Express 2.1 £100


or

XFX HD 5830 XXX 840MHz Edition 1GB DDR5 Dual DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card £84


All there's left to get is a cheap case and some fans No need for a monitor because most of us will be using ssh to access the supercomputer.

I will say ATM I'm partial to ATI gpu's the reason is simply down to the fact that they have more cores than nvidia gpu's. I know CUDA has had a few years head start on ATI's stream and some key features are missing from the kernel modules etc. But they are catching up If you take a look at there latest SDK manual you will see there's not much you can't do with Stream that you can do with CUDA. Also there are some interesting additions to the latest SDK which is now called ATI APP. I think we are going to see some major improvements to OpenCL this year. Intel have released there evaluation version of OpenCL (sorry guys windows only ATM ) and lots of people jumping on board as time goes on. I could ramble on about this all day lol and probably ruffle some feathers ie. CUDA fanboys hehehe

Anyway lets here of your bargains / opinions !!!

[Archangel-Amael]

You should definitely look into the what purehate has built. Pretty sure there are some threads on it.
As far as cuda, pyrit and the like goes, he is very well versed in it.

[drgr33n]

Thanks for the reply Archangel-Amael. I have stumbled across some of purehate's posts. I'm not sure what he's rolling with now but I think he's a bit of a cuda fan When I decided to jump on the band wagon there was lots of interesting stuff and pro's / cons for CUDA vs ATI APP. I suppose I went with ATI as most of their development efforts seems to be directed at OpenCL rather than Nvidia pushing CUDA. I think in the end OpenCL will over take CUDA and CUDA will end up a set of OpenCL extensions rather than its own entity as it is today. for that reason alone I've decided to go for ATI and OpenCL to research GPGPU's.

I'm not really into cracking WPA via Pyrit although I have had a go

[Thorn]

I like William Gibson's idea: A 3D grid of scaffolding holding several hundred Sinclair ZX-81's.

[Barry]

I was going to post a link to the handhelds.org compaq ipaq cluster, but the site is under construction.

[Caelus]

Take a look at the PSU wattage...

Those GPU's take around 500Watts (both), the processor 95Ws (Athlon x2), you will only have 65Ws remaining to 'divide' between motherboard, memory, fans & other stuff.

If you choose any of the GPU's and pick the Phentom processor you will only have 25Ws to fans and motherboard

[thorin]

I like William Gibson's idea: A 3D grid of scaffolding holding several hundred Sinclair ZX-81's.

Hackers Movie Trailer

You want a seriously righteous hack? You score one of those Gibsons man.

Sorry it just had to be said

[drgr33n]

Those GPU's take around 500Watts (both

lol no where near Radeon 5830 draws about 170w under full load the 5850 160+ max and the 5870 only draws about 188w. Don't believe me google them

So if I'm lenient and give you that the power hungry Athlon was overclocked to the max drawing 120w 2 5870 drawing 376w (this is the worst case scenario everything is working 100%) gives you a total of 496w and leaves you 154w for everything else although this is very close to the limit as that 650w psu aint going to actually push 650w I think it will be able to handle that lot.

lol @ the gibson

[longjidin]

hahaha..!!! thanks to purehate....now i have some ideas

[hhmatt]

You didn't make any mention of the cost of your hard drives, case, or cooling method.

I wanted to build something similar that I was just looking up for fun. But I don't have the money available at the moment. I would beef that up a little bit.

I saw a very nice asus dual socket motherboard with 2 or 4 PCI-E x16 slots.
If I remember correctly they were intel socket 1366. Yes, that means dual i7's, and if you have the cash you can put in for the black edition (or whatever they are calling it with the i7's) and run water cooling so you can overclock if you want.
DDR3 RAM
I would say it doesn't matter too much as to whether you use ATi or Nvidia as long as your cards are GDDR5 and 1GB GRAM. These will become the first thing you upgrade in the future. Next the hard drive will be SSD for the OS, and seperate SATA hard drives for data storage. If you wanted redundancy. I would RAID 1 SSD's and RAID 5 the SATA.
I would dual boot with 2 SSD's and setup a decent RAID5 SATA configuration.

Get a decent case and water cool it. As far as a power supply you will want to get a 1000W probably, but this may be overkill depending on what you do.
Even with water cooling you want to put a couple nice fans in for airflow this is especially true for the hard drives. (It's overkill to watercool the hard drives.)

Remember, you get what you pay for. This would cost quite a bit but I hope you get some idea's.