[Beowulf] commercial clusters

[Stuart Midgley]

I've spoken quite extensively to several organisations here in  
Western Australia who each have 1000+cpu systems in Perth, 2000+cpu  
systems in London and 4000+ systems in Houston (oil and gas seismic  
processing).  They tell me that they have tried to sell just the  
cycle time to no success.  The value is in the specialised services  
they offer (in these cases seismic processing), which just happen to  
use a lot of cpu's.

These companies even go as far to roll their own cluster file systems  
(using FUSE+nfs) and writing their own queuing/scheduling environment  
etc.  The higher level services certainly pay well :)

Stu.

On 27/09/2006, at 3:10, Angel Dimitrov wrote:

>
>  Hello,
>
>  I have some experience of running of numerical weather models on
> clusters.
>
>  Is there many clients for processor time? As I saw the biggest
> supercomputers in the World are very busy! I'm wondering if it's
> worthwhile to setup a commercial cluster. Intel are planning for new
> processors - two CPUs each with quad cores. Two such machines will
> have power like one 50 GHz CPU:-)
>
>  Any ideas and comments are welcome!
>
>  Angel


--
Dr Stuart Midgley
sdm900 at gmail.com