disadvantages of linux cluster - admin

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Maurice Hilarius wrote:

> The Tyan DOA rate is high, but once in service are the same or lower than 
> most Intel boards, so I can't buy into the reliability claim.

Here I have to back RGB's side: 2 out of 16 Tyan 2462 mainboards died 
after several months of perfect functioning. And these are the only 2 
mainboards that ever died in my 4 years of sysadmin here.

> Also, the way some people throw around how "Athlons use a lot of power and 
> make heat" or "Tyans use a lot of power" are simply propagating urban 
> legends (a legend that Intel does everything it can to fuel).

I would not phrase it like that, but rather "Athlon based nodes are more 
sensible to temperature". In a small computer room we gathered close to 
150 nodes and because of the poor A/C unit(s), the temperature would go to 
over 30 degrees Celsius. More than half of the nodes and some other 
computers in the room (like our file-server!) which are Intel-based (but 
only PII and PIII) were never affected by the temperature, while the 
Athlon-based were randomly crashing; when lowering the temperature in the 
room to close to 20 degrees Celsius, the same Athlon-based nodes worked 
perfectly in the same load conditions. Are the tolerances in the overall 
system design larger in Intel's case ?
Please note that when I wrote about "affected by temperature" I didn't 
take into consideration the dead fans and that I was talking about 
"Athlon-based systems" and not Athlon processors per-se.

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu at IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De