[Beowulf] New article for ClusterWorld

[Franz Marini]

Hi Jeff,

 sounds an interesting idea for an article :)

 We're right now deciding what to do with our (or should I say, the
remnants of) old 16 nodes cluster. 
 Right now, after several years of service, and two upgrades, there only
remain 1 really old pIII 500MHz node, a couple of pIII 800, and 6 P4
2.4-2.6. It's been used for about 6 months now as a "batch system" for
sequential jobs, mainly because most of our codes scale really bad with
fast ethernet, and as such we migrated all of them to our (almost) new
InfiniBand one.
 That said, I decided to :

 - donate the old pIII 500MHz node to some school or something, provided
that bureaucracy doesn't get in the way...
 - pick up the P4s and use them to replace the oldest workstation we
have here (there are still a couple of pII 300MHz around ;)).
 - use the remaining pIIIs as replacement, untill every workstation here
is at least a pIII 800, and then donate the remaing ones.

 We reached a point were upgrading and renewing the cluster simply isn't
economically sound. What we thought of is, imho, the best use we could
find for it.

 Hope this helps you, have a good day,


F.

 
On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 22:31, Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
> Good afternoon!
> 
>    I've been thinking of writing a new article for
> ClusterWorld about what people do with their old
> clusters. the title would be something like,
> "What to do With Old Clusters" or "Where Old
> Cluster Go to Die." I'm hoping to convince the
> editor to run the article at some point, but in the
> meantime, I'm looking for people who would be
> willing to share their stories with me. I have one
> story about a system I used to work on, but I'm
> looking for others.

 
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Franz Marini
Sys Admin and Software Analyst,
Dept. of Physics, University of Milan, Italy.
email : franz.marini at mi.infn.it
phone : +39 02 50317221
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