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<p class="MsoNormal">How old is the old cluster? You might actually spend more time trying to get the nodes all working than you’d save by having them as a compute element. I’ve looked at piles of computers in my garage and thought “hey, I should cluster
them” and then, I realize that the discount laptop I can buy for a few hundred bucks will blow the combination away.<br>
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So, unless you’re “learning how to build a cluster”, I wouldn’t think that’s the way to go. And for the “how to bring up a cluster tinkering”, a batch of rPi or beagles and a cheap switch is probably cheaper and more reflective of modern distros.<br>
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OTOH, if your three old nodes are a year old, then have at it.<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">From: </span></b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">Beowulf <beowulf-bounces@beowulf.org> on behalf of "jaquilina@eagleeyet.net" <jaquilina@eagleeyet.net><br>
<b>Date: </b>Saturday, February 1, 2020 at 10:45 PM<br>
<b>To: </b>Mark Kosmowski <mark.kosmowski@gmail.com>, "beowulf@beowulf.org" <beowulf@beowulf.org><br>
<b>Subject: </b>[EXTERNAL] Re: [Beowulf] First cluster in 20 years - questions about today<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Hi Mark,</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">So you are going to revive your old 3 node cluster and expand that? I would suggest if you are looking to expand the cluster I would look at the ryzen epyc rome 2 the second generation of these chips is quite impressive
in the sense you can do double the amount of 2 single intel chips. They vary from 8 core 16 threads up to 64 core 128 threads. Also you don’t have all these issues that intel are currently facing with 7nm process as well as the vulnerabilities. I just moved
my gaming pc from a 6<sup>th</sup> gen i7 to a ryzen 5 3600 6 core 12 thread machine and im seeing a huge difference in performance.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Regards,</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Jonathan Aquilina</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">EagleEyeT</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Phone +356 20330099</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Sales – <a href="mailto:sales@eagleeyet.net">
sales@eagleeyet.net</a></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Support – support@eagleeyet.net</span><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">___________________________________________________________________________________________</span><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> Beowulf <<a href="mailto:beowulf-bounces@beowulf.org">beowulf-bounces@beowulf.org</a>>
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Mark Kosmowski<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Sunday, 2 February 2020 04:21<br>
<b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org">beowulf@beowulf.org</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> [Beowulf] First cluster in 20 years - questions about today<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I've been out of computation for about 20 years since my master degree. I'm getting into the game again as a private individual. When I was active Opteron was just launched - I was an early adopter of amd64 because I needed the RAM (maybe
more accurately I needed to thoroughly thrash my swap drives). I never needed any cluster management software with my 3 node, dual socket, single core little baby Beowulf. (My planned domain is computational chemistry and I'm hoping to get to a point where
I can do ab initio catalyst surface reaction modeling of small molecules (not biomolecules).)<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I'm planning to add a few nodes and it will end up being fairly heterogenous. My initial plan is to add two or three multi-socket, multi-core nodes as well as a 48 port gigabit switch. How should I assess whether to have one big heterogenous
cluster vs. two smaller quasi-homogenous clusters?<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Will it be worthwhile to learn a cluster management software? If so, suggestions?<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Should I consider Solaris or illumos? I do plan on using ZFS, especially for the data node, but I want as much redundancy as I can get, since I'm going to be using used hardware. Will the fancy Solaris cluster tools be useful?<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Also, once I get running, while I'm getting current with theory and software may I inquire here about taking on a small, low priority academic project to make sure the cluster side is working good?<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Thank you all for still being here!<o:p></o:p></p>
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