Rack mounted systems.

[Erik Mintz]

	The tightest density in today's market is with the RIA model servers from
Crystal, they are less than 1U, with a special hot-plug mounting system.
Check them out on their
site -http://crystalpc.com/products/computers/ria.asp You can fit 52 in a
standard 7ft rack. they have built custom backplanes for me, and they have
twin processor boards under development.
To load a cabinet with 52 servers, you'll need to order extra power, and
good cooling (raised floor, low ambient temp, etc.). If you'd like, I can
set you up with a sales engineer. I use them extensively, great systems.
	The next step down from that would be Compaq with their dl360 models at 1U
(42 servers in a 7ft rack). They come standard with dual capable
motherboards, and two PCI slots. They also have a built in twin ethernet
chipset, but I've had problems with this chipset and Beowulf (intel). The
compaqs also need more cooling and power than the Crystals, but they have a
fast built in scsi with hot-swap drives.

The Crystals spec out to .87U. That = 520 nodes in 10 racks. You also need
supporting network hardware. Right now I think you can get the most ports/U
from a cisco 3548 series switch at 1U each. it's a stackable, but if you
need density over fault tolerance, it will work nicely.

-Erik

Erik Mintz
Domestic Field Engineering Manager
Mail.com
732-516-2767 emintz at staff.mail.com

-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-admin at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-admin at beowulf.org]On
Behalf Of Paul Hoffman
Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2001 3:55 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Rack mounted systems.



Am attempting to estimate machine room floor space for a fairly
large Beowulf cluster (~500 processors.) Here are my questions
re: loading these into racks: (assume Pentium processors)

- what is the minimum width of a 2-way node? (1U, 2U?)

- how many nodes can reasonably be put in a standard
  10" rack? i.e. can the rack be fully loaded or is
  some spacing required?

Thanks.
paul /



_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list
Beowulf at beowulf.org
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf