Friday, October 7, 2011

Building A Bot Server (Part 2 of 7)

So you've decided to build a specialized machine to run your bot empire. There are good reasons to do so:

It consolidates the number of physical machines which must be kept running, cooled and more importantly in my case, saves on the physical space needed to house this.

Power consumption will decrease. Modern machines are more efficient and there will be few moving parts, like fans,

So let's look into the details:

Case or Housing Unit:

Get a big case and make certain it has plenty of fans and ventilation. I have a case which the entire side panel houses one giant twelve (12) inch fan and that fan definitely can pull heat away from the motherboard. For myself, I'll be using that case for obvious reasons: The giant fan and that I already have a case. I just need to make certain the motherboard will fit inside this case, but that's a minor concern as motherboards are built in standardized ways:

Motherboard and CPU's

Long time PC hobbyists remember the speed wars of the 1990's where Intel and AMD would brag about which chip they made was the “fastest”. Then the speed war quietly stopped. No longer did we hear of 2.4, 2.8, and 3.0 Ghz chips and the speed never increased. Curious about that, I researched the issue and found out that the reason chips cannot go faster is that there is an annoying law of physics: the speed of light is constant and that is now the bottleneck. How fast can light go in one gigasecond? About three inches. How big is a computer chip? About three inches.

So the movement now is towards parallel processing, multiple chips which can handle more tasks and could have dedicated chips towards this venture. These days, four CPU's is fairly common. This is enough to run three (3) or four (4) bots. We'll get into that later on in this series.

One final point: Try and get the CPU's and motherboard at the same time and make certain they are compatible with each other. I've encountered situations where CPU's and motherboards do not play nicely with each other and those are very difficult to diagnose.

We'll continue this next time.

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