[Beowulf] slightly [OT] smp boxes

[Nifty niftyompi Mitch]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 12:26:54PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
> andrew holway wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> If you wanted to buy an smp machine of 8, 16 or 32 sockets, what would
>> be your options?
>
> x86 architecture?  Others?

To what purpose?
Why so many sockets, for Beowulf?

The Sicortex system has lots of cores and some of their smaller
development systems and might qualify if the goal is to research
SMP, NUMA, and single system memory image.

As fast as CPU cores are today, memory and coherency protocols will hobble
the system in unexpected ways....  In some cases Infiniband bandwidth
between single and dual socket systems is an improvement over large socket
count boxes.   For some chassis large socket counts permit more RAM...




-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Found me a new hat, now what?