Building Liquid cooled Dedicated Servers

Building a server from scratch sounds easier than it is, especially when you don’t build systems for a living. I have a good understanding of computers and have a bit of a background in dedicated servers, but this project was going to be a challenge. To build a dual socket 771, also known as a socket J, Quad core, liquid cooled server. Wow that is a mouth full.


First off there is the socket 771 motherboard.
The frame for my dedicated server, I chose the Supermicro XDA7A8E socket 771 J motherboard capable of supporting two quad core Xeon CPUs and up to 32 GB of memory. This committed motherboard is capable of supporting both SATA 2 and SCSI 320 drives in a RAID format. Best of all it has two PCIe 16 slots. One PCIe slot is at X16 and one slot at X8 so you can place some decent cards into the server. The Intel S5000PSL is a more of a server oriented motherboard, however it has two PCIe 16 slots with X8 speed, so both of these specific servers will work with the all coveted 16 slots.


I plan to use the idle server time to crunch numbers for both Berkley’s Boinc Rosetta and Stanford’s Folding@home and this is where the PCI-e 16X slot comes in real handy. You might not now this but the Folding project can utilize certain ATI graphics card GPUs for doing some of the work. Currently only the X1600, X1800, and X1900 series are supported, but they are working on an update that is in closed beta. Once this is in open beta I presume that the HD 2000 series and HD 3000 series will be supported too.


While some people think that high end graphics cards are only for games, with the new video cards having over a Teraflop of processing power, I can see that fairly soon we will be able to use them as additional general or specific processors. However I digress, back to the topic at hand. I plan on installing either one or two of the video cards into each of my workstation builds, so when I am finished I will have two dedicated servers for helping the protein folding research.

 

Additional Considerations for the Dedicated Servers