Xbox clusters?

[John Burton]

Gary Jackson wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Velocet wrote:
>
> >Why bother when for about $300 USD you can put together a
> >cluster node with a 1.333GHz athlon with 256Mb of DDR ram?
>
> Because you don't have to "pay" for assembly, or debugging the
> equipment, or anything like that.  You even get a 90 day warranty.
> With a self assembled beige box, it may take you 90 days to figure out
> which part is broken.

Ummmm....speak for yourself. I've been putting together these "self assembled beige box" for many years and
currently have about
5% component DOA rate, and about another 1% infant mortality rate (crap out within 30 days).  Takes on average 4
hours to
determine what the bad component is and 24-48 hours to replace it. I've never spent more than 1 week "figuring
out" which
part is broken. The time I spent 1 week was due to a flakey memory chip that was causing filesystem errors in a
90GB RAID 5
array.  Flakey memory is difficult to track down because it can masquerade as virtually anything else...

With the current components, you put it together and it either works or doesn't. If it doesn't you can usually
zero in on the
problem pretty quickly... buy quality components that you know work together and your job is even easier

John