[Beowulf] a cluster to drive a wall of monitors

Evan Cull evan.cull at duke.edu
Tue Oct 12 18:47:29 PDT 2004


Hi all,

I was told this list would be a good place to ask for advice on the 
following project.  (I've tried to search through list archives for 
related info, but I haven't managed to spot anything so far.) 

I'm helping with a project that want's to drive a wall of about 50 LCD 
panels with a linux cluster running Syzygy:
http://www.isl.uiuc.edu/syzygy.htm

I was considering a cluster of either 50 single processor nodes or 25 
dual processor + dual output graphics card nodes.  I suppose 50 dual 
processor nodes would be nice, but I'm pretty sure that's well out of my 
budget range.  I'm betting that the 50 single processor nodes would 
easily have twice the graphics performance of the 25 dual nodes because 
they have 2x as many video cards.  The tradeoff here is that the dual 
processor nodes might be more useful for other more general computing 
tasks we could run on them. 

Does anyone here have experience buying rackmountable cluster nodes 
*with graphics cards* who can point me to a vendor?

For that matter, have any of you built a similar system & have any 
suggestions / comments?

thanks,
Evan Cull




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