Artsy Recycling

Even when you actually want to recycle computer parts (especially scrap parts that do not quite work anymore) it’s quite hard to do so. One possible solution is to simply chuck everything in the usual recycling bin and hope for the best. Or you can try to find a metal reseller. Or you can use the parts in a creative way. Kind of.

I disassembled the CFM01 and got quite a lot of spare parts from the 1U Pentium III servers. The casings aren’t all that interesting since they’re fairly cheap (compared to, say, a Dell PowerEdge server) and the CPUs are useless. Nobody wants them. Even recycling the all-copper heat sink proved a problem. So I used them differently.

The CFM-01

In a previous post, I presented the CFM-00, a “cluster” of 8 Pentium III at 500MHz, assembled into one MDF casing. The assembly was rather clean-cut given the rather rudimentary materials (MDF and threaded rods) but the resulting computing power is dismal (but that’s no surprise). We have about 2GHz of computing power, and at 128MB of ram per node, it makes running even just a remote shell not that responsive.

A few months ago, my friend Christopher came to me with a data center clearing deal with Pentium III 1GHz 1U rack-mount (with 512MB of RAM) servers for $15, and I got eight of them to build the CFM-01, the successor to the CFM-00. But I did not strip the motherboards from their casing this time, I built an inexpensive rack out of slotted angle steel.