[Beowulf] Third-party drives not permitted on new Dell servers?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Lux, Jim (337C)
<james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
> Unfortunately, the HPC (Beowulf) world is driven by the economics of the ordinary consumer/office desktop computer.  That's what lets you build a teraflop machine without incurring the debt of a small country: you can leverage the mass production for consumers which drives the prices down, but also has very short product cycles.
>
> The 3 year cycle is driven by in large part by IRS depreciation rules which call computer equipment a "5-year" piece of gear, but

On the other hand many of the Beowulfers are in the govt. / university
/ higher-ed. domain where things run somewhat "tax free"? Not sure if
then these IRS writeoffs then factor much into decision making or not.
All the more reason to avoid getting locked-in to 3-year vendor
cycles.

-- 
Rahul