clusters v SMP

[Ricky Rankin]

At Queen's we hope to have abot £300K to spend on a new 
facility. We currently have a Sun 3500 with 6 processors and 6GB 
of memory and a 48 Node IBM SP.

At one stage we had thought that the budget would be around 
£150K and had been looking for a Linux Cluster, however with 
more money potentially available and having had presentations 
from IBM and SGI with Sun and Compaq to follow we are now 
completely confused.

The 4GB memory restriction of an Intel node would be too 
restrictive for some of our users. The majority I suspect are 
still running single processor jobs while we have several users 
who can exploit parallel architectures.

Some advice on the pros and cons of the different architectures 
would be appreciated - we are looking for a central production 
system and not one that is owned by a department.

Thanks
Ricky

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Ricky Rankin
Principal Analyst
Computing Services
Queen's University Belfast

tel: 02890 273819
fax: 02890 230592
email: r.rankin at qub.ac.uk