[Beowulf] Thinking about going used

[Gerald Creager]

I've been getting Dell 1425's for <$100 and adding $150 worth of memory 
to make 'em a usable small server. I think they're OK for low-end 
compute nodes, but watching the list there are other machines more suitable.

gerry

David Mathog wrote:
> There are a lot of rack mount servers showing up on ebay and elsewhere
> after they come out of service at data centers after a few years.  These
> might not cut it for the cutting edge folks, but would be fine for us to
> replace our existing (ancient) cluster.
> 
> Any suggestions for models to look at for a good price/performance point
> for say 2-4 cores in the box, 1 or 2 SATA disks, and at least one
> 1000baseT interface, and a good reliability history?  (The disks would
> probably be bought separately as a lot of these are sold diskless, and
> new disks aren't that expensive.)   
> 
> For instance, there have recently been a lot of Arima/Rioworks HDAMA
> based dual dual core Opteron systems advertised.  Possibly because they
> are old enough that nobody wants to buy them ;-).  Those would be fast
> enough for us, but the SATA controller seems to be just for RAID usage.
>  Might work though if these support "raid 0" on a single disk.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
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