[Beowulf] Intro question

[Peter St. John]

Malcolm,

Just a plug for the recherche' space-minimization solution (I'm still
thinking about my own hypothetical cluster, as you are). This article
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8177
is Ron Minnich's "Beowulf in a Lunchbox"; 16 mini motherboards with risers.

You could possibly consider a rackable system with diskless nodes
(hand-me-down desktop motherboards, with onboard NIC, would fit in 1U
slots,  right?) and put the disks and power supplies and routers in a dense
2 or 3U space. Then maybe you could just load it all into a rack lafter the
initial development in your basement. But as RGB mentions it depends on lots
of things; heat, dust in your office, the budget, etc.

Incidentally, if you built say 4 single-slot quad-core nodes with 2
dual-slot 8 core (per board) nodes, then you could find out which
bandwidth/mem-channel/per-core configuration works better for your app,
instead of anticipating; in the case that your initial prototype needn't be
ideal.

Peter

P.S. incidentally, I think that Ron Minnich is the one I knew in High
School; which is a bit odd, parallel to RGB from Duke. Next I'll meet a
bewulfer from my kindergarden class :-)

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 6:05 AM, malcolm croucher <malcolm.croucher at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hi  Guys ,
>
> I am still thinking about my cluster and most probably will only begin
> development next year june/july .
>
> Question :
>
> If i develop my system on  10 computers (nodes) which are all normal
> desktops and then would like to place this in data hosting facility which
> has access to real time information . I am going to need to buy new servers
> (thin 1 u servers ). Would this be the best choice as desktops take up more
> space and therefore will be more expensive . how do you guys get around this
> problem ? or dont you ?
>
> Regards
>
> Malcolm
>
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