Tiger MP motherboard in rack

[Bob Drzyzgula]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 12:52:26PM +0100, Wolfgang.Dobler at kis.uni-freiburg.de wrote:
> 
> Our institute is planning to buy a 6-8 node Dual AMD (1800+MP) cluster,
> either as towers or in a rack.
>
> One vendor suggested Tyan Tiger MP motherboards for the tower variant but
> the much more expensive Tyan Thunder K2 S2462NG for the rack cluster,
> while another vendor says we can use the same motherboard (Tiger MP) in
> both cases.
> 
> Can anybody give advice on whether it is a good idea or not to use the
> Tiger MP motherboard in a 2-unit rack? Are there thermal problems; would
> we need special ventilation?


I suspect that the one vendor is making the selection based
on the level of integration on the board. The Thunder K7
has on-board dual 10/100 ethernet, dual Ultra 160 SCSI
and a 4MB ATI Rage graphics interface. The Tiger has
none of these things. Thus, to the extent that you need
any of these interfaces in your system, you'll need to
do it with PCI cards. In a tower case, this is usually a
non-issue. In a typical 2U rack, you can fit two PCI cards
using right-angle adapters, but you are unlikely to be
able to achieve the per-node I/O capacity of Thunder K7.
Clearly you'll need at least one network card for the
Beowulf node, and thus you'd have to choose among
graphics, SCSI or possibly a second network card for the
second slot -- none of which are typically critical for
a Beowulf node, but it all depends on other aspects of
the application and the cluster design.

--Bob Drzyzgula