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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>hi All of you,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Now that developments go fast in CPU land, by 22
july or so, intel drops price of its quad core to $266 more or
less.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hopefully AMD's quadcore chip releases soon too for
a decent price.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>As intels memory subsystem is real weak, not to
mention the extra price that AMD and intel ask for dual socket/quad socket
capable chips, the optimal node is a single socket node.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>4 cores is already a lot anyway for 1 highend
network card.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>That means in short that you can produce for quite
little money, far under $500, a node with 4 cores, </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>or considering the far higher taxrates in Europe,
far under 500 euro in Europe.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Basically what a node needs is a mainboard, a bit
of RAM, and a cpu with cooler. That keeps a node tiny and it's easier coolable.
With some wood then you can build a great case that holds many nodes. Booting of
course diskless over the gigabit network. Of course interesting to know secondly
is whether putting in ECC-reg ram is interesting, considering its scandaleous
high price always.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>What are opinions here?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Of course now the question is how to get a
reasonable low latency highend network with a reasonable bandwidth (latency
bigger priority than bandwidth of course) and of course being capable of reading
in memory without writing. Of course the switch/routing prices + cable prices
need to be included in those price considerations.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Perhaps some bit older generation card gets sold
very cheap now. What are the options the coming years there, any
manufacturer keeping up with the dropped price of a single quad core
node?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Gigabit ethernet is not an option of course, that
just works for embarrassingly parallel software, it's usually interrupting
bigtime the cpu and has an ugly one-way pingpong latency, especially when there
is several threads simultaneously shipping messages. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>What are the options for the network in the
future?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Vincent</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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