[Beowulf] A bit OT - scientific workstations - recommendations

[Douglas Eadline]

> - 24/7/365 next day on site support

Let's consider this idea in light of commodity hardware.
(i.e. why I don't buy service contracts on light bulbs)

Assuming that you can ship a node back for no cost repair within a
warranty period, the question to ask is how many spare nodes
can I buy for the price of a service contract for all the nodes
in my cluster?

for instance:

 (16 nodes + 1 spare) = (16 nodes + hw support contract)

In some cases it may be cheaper to buy extra node(s). Indeed,
in the example if you use your spare node(s), then you are ahead
(your have 17 nodes). If a node breaks, then you are back to
your baseline number of 16 nodes while the broken node is
getting repaired. Or, keep the spare on a shelf.

Using stateless nodes (like Warewulf or Scyld) make this even easier.


--
Doug





 --
Doug