The Badger Farm was a blade clustering project for the SETI@Home experiment running from 2005 to 2008.
SETI@Home is a distributed computing experiment, using Berkley's open-source BOINC platform. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project is a scientific experiment whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside of earth by listening for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not know to occur naturally, so detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. The SETI project makes use of idle computer systems across the globe to help analyse radio telescope data. Taking this approach to sift through the data saves money and allows the data to be analysed in depth. Learn more at their website.
I was intrigued by the SETI project when I first discovered it in 2004. After some research I came across several SETI Farms. SETI Farms are groups of individual computers at the same location all dedicated to running the SETI software 24/7.
Early 2005, the first incarnation of The Badger Farm was setup. A SETI Farm, running on spare pre-built computers and using the pre-installed Operating System. I soon discovered that running a SETI Farm in this manner wasted an extreme amount of electricity and produced an obscene amount of heat and noise. This led to the cases of each machine being stripped down and spare hardware being removed.
Several machines from the first Badger Farm
I'd learnt very quickly on that SETI Farms were not ideal. Mid 2005 the size of the farm had grown to more than 10 machines. When I moved to University, the size of the farm meant it had to be scrapped.
Further research brought me to SETI Stacks. SETI Stacks, like SETI Farms run the SETI software 24/7 but are heavily optimized, custom built computer systems. Generally each node in a SETI Stack uses the same hardware configuration, are headless (no keyboard, mouse or monitor), do not have computer cases and are housed in special custom made server racks.
A few of the SETI Stacks I came across had gone to the extremes of optimization by running as Blade Clusters. Blade Clusters are the same as SETI Stacks but completely free of any moving parts, no hard drives, no cd drives, no keyboards, no mice, no monitors and no fans. Having a computer system with no moving parts deduces the risk of failure, lowers power consumption and speeds up the system.
At the start of 2006 I started researching and designing a Blade Cluster. It took several months to complete as a custom Linux distro had to be written for the task. Based on Centos 4, a slim-lined, fully optimized distro was written. As the Blade Cluster would be free from all moving parts a PXE and TFTP boot server was setup on a spare laptop which would act as the Master Node. The Master Node contained the configuration settings for each of the nodes as well as the kernel and root file system. To save space 6 Mini-ITX style motherboards were used, stacked in threes using threaded aluminium rods and PCV tubes for spacers.
The first stack used by The Badger Farm
Each node had the same hardware configuration; a jetway BN860T Micro-ATX flex motherboard, 1.0 Ghz Intel PIII Processor and 512MB of Ram. For power each stack used a single 300w micro-silent PSU split three ways. The setup allowed each node to be hot swappable, allowing for minimal downtime. Benchmark tests showed that The Badger Farm, including master node was capable of performing at 7.1 teraFLOP/s.
The Badger Farm was retired Mid 2008, with hardware being re-allocated for other uses.