What Would I Do With A Million Dollars?

I saw a post yesterday about what someone would do with a million dollars. He said he would buy some crazy macs of course. The specs were amazing. Reading that post got me thinking though – What would I do with a million dollars?

After about a good 30 seconds or so, the answer was quite clear. I would make my own data center, duh!

And of course I would save several servers for my own private use for research on Distributed Computing. Because I think that is really interesting and would love to do work with it in the future.

Anyways, I immediately set out to find some hardware that I would use in my new Data Center.

The first thing that you would need obviously is for a Data Center would be a place to hold data. So I found this:
LACIE 300961 2TB Gigabit Ethernet Shared Hard Drive

Connects through a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, and each has a 2TB capacity. VIA C3 800Mhz processor and 256MB of RAM.

Price Per Unit: $859.99

Quantity: 100

Total Cost: $85,999.00

After buying these i would now have $914,001.00 left to play with. Time for some processing power.

I put together a custom rack. Quite powerful in my opinion. Heres the specs:

Custom Rack Unit

CPU:
2 x Intel Xeon X5450 Harpertown 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor

2MB L2 Cache

1333 Mhz FSB and 64 bit support

Motherboard:

TYAN S5397AG2NRF Dual 771 Extended ATX Server Motherboard

Dual 771 CPU Sockets

1600/1333/1066 Mhz FSB

16 x 240 pin DDR2 Memory Slots

1 PATA / 6 SATA II

3 x On-Board Gigabit LAN
RAM:

Kingston 2GB 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM PC-5300 Server Memory

2GB Capacity

PC-5300 Speed

Power Supply:

iStarUSA TC-350R2U 2 x 320w Server Power Supply

24 Pin Power Connector

2 x 350 Watts

2 Fans

Of course, to wrap it all up, I need a case…

Case:
iStarUSA D-200-PFS Black Steel 2U Server Case

1 External 5.25″ Drive Bay

1 External 3.5″ Drive Bay

2 Internal 3.5″ Drive Bays

3 Expansion Slots

2U Form Factor

2 x 80mm Fans

Price Per Unit: $3,875.82

Quantity: 100

Total Cost: $387,582.00

Ok, so now at this point, I have $526,419.00 left to spend. Haven’t even spent half yet.

What is the next thing that any Data Center needs? Internet of course. The data center is no good if no one can access it.

If I were to get 30/15Mbps service, It costs $239.99/month for a 2 year agreement. which comes out to be $5,760 for two years. leaving me with $520,659.00

Now that seems like a large amount of money, but if you really think about it. I would probably use the rest for an office/building, utilities, and repairs and maybe some employees. So now that I look at it, starting a Data Center would be hard because you end up spending more money on other things and less on actual computers. That’s disappointing.

Boo for inefficient applications!

Everyone has used one. Mostly because everyone has used Internet Explorer. But everyone has gotten one of those programs that is just slow and a total resource hog. We all know and hate them. You feel even worse, though, when you realize you have created one yourself. I was pretty happy when I posted last because I had gotten a connection between the server and the client and everything was working pretty well.

Unfortunately, now I realize that, even though it does not use a whole lot of memory, the server uses 99% of my CPU. And I have a decent CPU as well. I mean, I know why it does it but i guess i have to figure out a way around it. Heres the code snippet that I’m pretty sure causes the problems:


while (true) {
if (server.Pending()) {
server.AcceptSocket();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Connection Accepted");
}
}

As you can see, the code just creates an infinite loop that checks for connections. Unfortunately this causes it to check about 2 billion times a second. which obviously…would use all of your processors resources. I’m trying to use a timer that checks every second, but I’m having trouble implementing it in a console application. Maybe I will change the server to a GUI application. Might be easier to do a lot of things. I guess I’ll have to ponder it for a while

EDIT: The problem has been fixed! Hooray! With a little bit of help from my good friend Windy, Just putting System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000); at the end brought the CPU usage down to 00% :] And it even brought down the memory usage a little! Hooray!