[Beowulf] Not quite Walmart, or, living without ECC?

[David Mathog]

There are some pretty good deals in the low end of the mother board
and CPU ranges right now.  Not what you folks would buy, but something
I'd consider to replace the old Athlon MP's in our 2U cases, one of
which just blew up (or the Tyan motherboard, it hardly matters as I
don't have spares for either part).  It looks like one can buy
a dual core Athlon64, 1 Gb of memory, 1G Lan, and low end VGA on a
consumer motherboard for around $150.  Maybe less. With the recycled
case, fans, PS, and disks that would be an inexpensive way to more
than resuscitate the dead node(s).

The one thing that I don't see cheap anywhere is ECC RAM and
motherboards that support it.  

Any of you running clusters without ECC?  Has the lack of error
correction been a problem?

Thanks,  

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech