[Beowulf] Re: Intro question

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, Mark Hahn wrote:

> if office, I'd certainly just get minitowers.

For office, I would recommend barebones in SFF (small form factor) 
cases, like those commonly advertised for HTPC (Home theater PC). I 
have built a cluster of 80 of those (Shuttle SB75G2) in 2004, you can 
see a rather bad picture in the "IWR Cluster 4 part a" section of:

http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/services/equipment/parallel/

Because of their number, they are located in a well cooled computer 
room, the total consumption being close to 9KW under load. These 
barebones often contain what is needed for a simple cluster node, with 
only CPU, memory and possibly a disk to be added. The cooling is often 
better designed than in a normal (mini-)tower case and because of 
their intended usage they can be even quiter - but the difference 
between the different models or manufacturers can be huge. The price 
is slightly higher than a comparable (mini)tower; the impression that 
it makes on visitors is however much greater ;-)

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 54 8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8850
E-mail: bogdan.costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de