Into the Void

The LiquidLan project has been revived after almost two years of not working on it.  My capstone professor has approved it to be my capstone project, so now I can’t graduate unless I finish it… how’s that for motivation?!!  There’s a lot of work left to do, and I’ll be working solo, but I guarantee it will be finished in time to present this May.  I’ll update my progress on it at the official site: http://www.liquidlan.net/ … check it out!

My friend Nick was asked last week by his dad to build him “the fastest computer possible”.  He said emphatically that price is no object and if it ends up costing $10,000 then so be it (yes, they are very wealthy).  I immediately jumped on board to help out because building a computer with no budget has always been something on my wish list… even if it would not be my own.

As of now, we have picked out most of the components for it, including an SLI-enabled motherboard with nForce 4 Ultra, AMD Athlon X2 4800+, two GeForce 7800GTX-SLI graphics cards, 4GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR400 memory, 550W Antec power supply, two 150GB 15000rpm SAS hard drives, and an LSI SAS-RAID controller card.  The mass storage (SAS RAID) component alone is about $3,000, but we felt it was important to reduce the biggest bottleneck (disk I/O) as much as possible.  The average latency on these drives is less than 2ms!  We will set them up on a RAID0 and hope to achieve sustained throughput rates of close to 250MB/s.  This may be optimistic though.  I’ll let you know how it turns out and post some benchmarks once we have them.