Don't you wish you had classes like this?

K

kidicarus74

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 23, 2004
Messages
397
Update PICS ADDED 12/5!!!

Ok, little background info before the fun stuff: I'm currently a senior at the University of Missouri - Columbia (a.k.a. Mizzou) and I'm majoring in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. In order to graduate, each senior engineer must take a capstone class and complete a semester or year long project. Most people do things like making crappy video games via mods or writing a program to fix what's wrong with the registration system or building coding a microprocessor to do this or that (not all of them are crappy, just a majority since most don't want to put in any effort). My project is a little different...

Thru a grant to the university, i've been given a $15,000 budget to build the schools showcase multimedia entertainment and development server/workstation. I'm ordering the parts with the secretary of the department tomorrow morning, this is my project log. :D

Parts to be ordered (note: this has be designed, planned, and discussed with some of the best minds of my university over the past months since september, so i'm not just rushing out and dropping 12 grand on a whim):

-I Will DK8N Dual Socket 940 Server Motherboard
-Dual Opteron 246's
-4 gig (4x1 gig sticks) Corsair Low Latency ECC/Registered PC3200 RAM
-GeForce 6800 Ultra Dual DVI gfx card
-Blackmagic Decklink HD Pro Editing Capture card
-2x 74 gig WD Raptor 10k rpm SATA Hard Drives
-Adaptec 16 channel SATA RAID controller card
-16x Maxtor SATA II 300gig Hard drives
-Lian Li 2000V - Case
-I Star 400 x 400 watt redundant power supply
-2x Lite-On 16 DVD-RW DL Drives

i'm sure i'm forgetting something, but it's all on the PO and will hopefully be here friday, so there will definitely be pictures :D
 
Why not go SCSI over the Raptors?

Better speed and reliability.

Also, have you considered using the Matrix Parhelia?
 
the instructor really was set on a completely serial ata solution otherwise we would have....

almost forgot the kicker: i'm minoring in art, so for my senior design project i'm modding the case... for big football games we have the Mizzou "Blackout" where everyone knows to wear black to the games so the theme will be based on that...

as far as the parhelia, the dean of computer science is a FPS nut and during the proposal meeting really pushed for an all nVidia solution (the board is an nForce 3)
 
The nForce 3 150 Pro chipset is not worth the compromise. Instead, my opinion is that you should get a Tyan board with an AMD-made AGP tunnel.
 
if you did this in nyc i think they would shoot you, anyway lucky you, thats going to be awesome.
 
This is almost better than my "Youth Tech Entropenuers(sp?)" Computer class. All we do is CS and surf the net.

Hopefully I will encounter a class like yours when I go to college in 2 years.
 
I would really suggest you verify that the ram you are useing are on the mainbord mfg's certified list. I know I had some problems which ended up being caused by the rams very low timeings Another guy at work had similar problems, but we both were useing tyan bords.
 
I'm sorry, dude, but that's pretty lame for a year long senior project. What is the state of education today?

Guess I'm not sending my kids to Mizzou. :p

Glad you're havin' fun though. :)

BB
 
BB Gun said:
I'm sorry, dude, but that's pretty lame for a year long senior project.
BB
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I sincerely hope there is more to the project than building a computer. If there is not, I totally agree with BB.
 
Sounds like a big thing. Don't ruin it. It takes a lot of responsibility for that. $15K *is* a lot and if you ever did it successfully, you'd benefit them and benefit yourself as well, making yourself look very good on your transcript/resume. :)

-J.
 
as a matter of fact there is more to it than just building the comp, the design of the hardware was first semester. guess i should have said more than just the specs... i was all excited.

anyway, next semester my partner and i are writing (or rather fixing and optomizing) the software for this bad boy. In an ongoing project, the CS department will start offering a video-on-demand service for online movies to the dorms and other on campus housing. Also, there is a indie-film being shot in and around Columbia that is being filmed completely in digital. This is where the workstation part comes in. Our teraserver will allow the editors to capture all of the footage onto a single machine (being backed up on the school NFS of course) and then they will be able to do non-linear editing on raw high-def video, something that currently has only been acheivable either for small segments of film or on massive (in both size and cost) disk farms owned by big-budget production studios.

SO, it is more than just building a kick-ass computer (but that part certainly is fun). This morning we dropped $10 grand at newegg :D . Another 2k will be spend tomorrow on the Decklink HD card and then we still have to find a suitable display from a brick and mortar vendor so we're road tripping to St. Louis this weekend.

First round of pics tomorrow
 
For a workstation, why would you get the 6800 ultra over a quadro? The 6800 is resolution limited and for NLE systems you want as big of screen res as possible. This usually means a high res disply or displays. A 6800 wont cut it.
 
the computer classes my high school offered were LAME, and very few in selection

all they offered was: coding websites in HTML (and some basic CSS at the end), desktop publishing, keyboarding and "advanced computers" - which was supposedly their hardest computer class - and it was basically just "make images with photoshop for the whole semester".

so much for anything semi-useful for IT-related work :rolleyes:
 
ug_rulz_all said:
the computer classes my high school offered were LAME, and very few in selection

all they offered was: coding websites in HTML (and some basic CSS at the end), desktop publishing, keyboarding and "advanced computers" - which was supposedly their hardest computer class - and it was basically just "make images with photoshop for the whole semester".

so much for anything semi-useful for IT-related work :rolleyes:
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I skiped all the classes that my HS offered till I got to leave and go to a seperate "COOP" that offerd A+ (i didn't get to take it) and CISCO CCNA Cert. (in it right now :) )
 
Man... that sounds like an increadable idea. I'd love to just be able to touch the case haha but your going to be knee deep in it. I hope you do well with it. It sounds absolutely amazing.
 
ug_rulz_all said:
the computer classes my high school offered were LAME, and very few in selection

all they offered was: coding websites in HTML (and some basic CSS at the end), desktop publishing, keyboarding and "advanced computers" - which was supposedly their hardest computer class - and it was basically just "make images with photoshop for the whole semester".

so much for anything semi-useful for IT-related work :rolleyes:
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High school is a whole different ball game ;)
 
I wish I could restart my high school life. Sooo many mistakes I've made. Do not trust the guidance counselour (god I hated CAD and Architecture-- big F's?).

-J.
 
update: fedex man left a present in my office yesterday... the first order showed up so we're going to start building this afternoon... pics tonight :D
 
Here's what we've got so far

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more updates tomorrow, the 16 hard drives will be in and (hopefully) so will our apple 30" monitor!!
 
Umm...for future reference, DON'T set a piece of electronics on the outside of its static-proof bag. The inside may protect it from static, but the outside of the bag is quite dangerous to your electronics. The worst part of it is that while the pictured hardware may work right now, it might die in the future because of this exposure to electrostatic discharge.
 
i understand the concern, but the possibility of that is next to nil... any static charge from the bag will actually be transfered to the person handling the bag prior to even touching the card. We were standing on and antistatic production mat and had on antistatic bands so it's not really that much of a concern
 
Well that's good to know that you took the precautions. I guess the only thing I can say is that it gives noobs the wrong idea when they see pictures of electronics on anti-static bags, which is a common practice unfortunately.
 
Wow. That is a nice computer :O

And as for setting things on Static Bags... It isn't really the correct thing to do, but I doubt setting it on one for a few seconds while you look at something will hurt it, unless you have a static generator near-by ;).
 
By the time a nanosecond has passed by, ESD will have taken its toll. And like I said, it might not cause immediate damage, but it will shorten the lifespan of the device, and then some ignorant consumer will point the finger at the manufacturer.
 
Dont you need a dual link capable video card to push the apple 30" display? A 6800 ultra is single link.
 
well, we haven't bought the display yet, but i was under the impression that a dual dvi card could drive the apple display... it ran that IBM flat panel in those pictures (which is also dual dvi but i have no clue what size) at 3840x1200... plus, apple uses 6800ultras in their G5's... it'd be nice to know before we drop $3000 tho....
 
kidicarus74, I might be taking classes like that in four years. Check your PMs. It would be great to hear from you. :)
 
kidicarus74 said:
well, we haven't bought the display yet, but i was under the impression that a dual dvi card could drive the apple display... it ran that IBM flat panel in those pictures (which is also dual dvi but i have no clue what size) at 3840x1200... plus, apple uses 6800ultras in their G5's... it'd be nice to know before we drop $3000 tho....
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Yes, it would be nice to know. The Apple Cinema Display 30" requires dual-link DVI--two vanilla DVI ports won't do. That limits you to certain NVIDIA Quadro cards, a special GeForce 6800 DDL card, certain ATi FireGL cards, and maybe a few Matrox and 3DLabs cards
 
I'm not sure it was necessary to flame your peers in your original post. I'm not sure how you and your partner (two people???) were approved for a semester long project to build a computer. Don't get me wrong, it is cool. I just think two seniors in college would be required to do more in a semester than a kid in junior high could do in a day (not counting shipping time of course). You mention a couple things as lame and people don't want to put in any effort, but you and your partner are spending an entire semster ordering and building a really nice computer. Talk about minimal effort! Writing a mod for an existing game is quite challenging and requires a lot of effort. I've never tried, but I would imagine redesigning an entire campus' registration system would require exponentially more effort than spending an entire semster building a computer. Any programming on a low level system, such as a microcontroller, requires much more effort than putting together a computer. You must have meant physical effort. I will admit, sticking all those cards in the slots and screwing in all those drives would require a lot more physical effort. I bet your tired now. Maybe you should sit down and have a coke before you continue. Then recalibrate your "effort" scale and be thankfull you miracuously got away with a joke of a semester while the rest of us pray we never have to work with someone that has the audacity to belittle other's work when they have done significantly less.
 
i wasn't saying that they weren't projects that required no effort and had no benefit, the people that do them (the few that actually do put in the effort) get a lot out of the whole process, but 9 times out of 10 it's software that no one will ever use. In comparison, our project already is being used, and did require substantial effort. We had to write our own client-server program that could connect a mac g5 and our linux server that could deliver speeds of capable of real time raw HD editing... it's nothing to sneeze at... you try convincing a board of 7 50+ year old academic administrators that two 21 year olds should be given $15,000 of university funding to build a computer... no easy task

edit: if you really think it only takes a day to get a 4.5 TB linux server to do exactly what it's supposed to do... you've never tried it before, plus, the proposal (which is the bulk of the first semester of the project, at least 80%) was somewhere in the neighborhood of 170 pages. This isn't just picking out parts for a gaming rig, this server will be used for research in the engineering school, editing in the journalism school, and even by the VA Hospital here in columbia for temporary storage of 3-dimensional MRI images
 
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