<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>I have my eye on just such a machine (an older Cisco UCS C460 M2 with 4 x Xeon E7-4870 (10 core)). I'll know tomorrow if I was outbid or not. It is in my local area and shipping is high, so hopefully.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Message: 1<br>
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2020 18:14:00 -0600<br>
From: Jonathan Douglas Engwall <<a href="mailto:engwalljonathanthereal@gmail.com" target="_blank">engwalljonathanthereal@gmail.com</a>><br>
To: Mark Kosmowski <<a href="mailto:mark.kosmowski@gmail.com" target="_blank">mark.kosmowski@gmail.com</a>>, "<a href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org" target="_blank">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>"<br>
<<a href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org" target="_blank">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>><br>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] First cluster in 20 years - questions about<br>
today<br>
Message-ID: <<a href="mailto:1aehm2g2apv52ollgrey2doa.1580775240059@email.android.com" target="_blank">1aehm2g2apv52ollgrey2doa.1580775240059@email.android.com</a>><br>
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At least get a 4U, 4 CPU rack machine and don't even think of any GPU older than 2016. Better yet, look toward a DELL T440, they sell off when the warranty starts to go, practically new, at prices that will shock you; if you have paid for a laptop or phone recently.<br>
Industrial cast-offs are the way to go. You can try whatever you like that way, because you are running solid equipment.<br>
You can't protect yourself when a developer dumps support for this or that when everything you use is older, edge-case, or your own handiwork, professional it may be.<br>
<br>
Jonathan Engwall<br>
<br>
On February 1, 2020, at 9:21 PM, Mark Kosmowski <<a href="mailto:mark.kosmowski@gmail.com" target="_blank">mark.kosmowski@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
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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).)<br>
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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?<br>
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Will it be worthwhile to learn a cluster management software? If so, suggestions?<br>
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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?<br>
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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?<br>
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Thank you all for still being here!<br>
</blockquote></div></div></div></div>