Advice needed

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 05:15:27AM -0300, Delcides Flávio de Sousa Jr. wrote:

> 1. Is it better to get the fastest CPU or maybe something slower with more 
> memory ? 

It depends. If your application fits into a small amount of memory,
then you don't need to buy too much. If your application doesn't fit
in memory, you'll get a horrible slowdown.

> 2. From tutorials, papers and web pages I get the impression that
> it's better to start with less nodes with better hardware, e.g.

It depends. You might find your performance is better with more, slower
nodes. Depends on how tightly coupled your application is.

> 3. What is the performance penalty on running diskless nodes ? I mean, 
> comparing with a full/partial OS install on each node.

It depends. Today, the Scyld diskless distribution is definitely the
easiest to admin, and for your average MPI program, it works great.
But if you wanted to run scripts on all the nodes that accessed a lot
of other programs, Scyld wouldn't do the job.

greg