[Beowulf] Re: GPU boards and cluster servers.

[andrew holway]

The new Dell R5400 Rackmount workstation is ideal for this. You can
slip two Xeons, 16GB ram and two chunky graphics cards in there.

ta

Andy

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 6:06 AM, Li, Bo <libo at buaa.edu.cn> wrote:
> Hello,
> It seems your platform is more suitable for a cluster. Great, and when are
> the products available? And is there any software support from you?
> Regards,
> Li, Bo
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Maurice Hilarius
> To: Li, Bo
> Cc: kus at free.net ; i.kozin at dl.ac.uk ; Beowulf Mailing List
> Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 9:36 AM
> Subject: GPU boards and cluster servers.
> Li, Bo wrote:
>
> Hello,
> Is it too expensive for the platform?
> The easy solution is:
> And X48 level motherboard with CF support, about $150
> Q6600 Processor, about $170
> Two 4870X2 $1,100
> Two Seagate SATA Harddisk 500G for Raid1, about $140
> 4*2G DDR2 RAM, about $150
> PSU 1000W, about $200
> A big box, about $100
>
> That's all, in total, $2,010.
> Regards,
> Li, Bo
>
> True, to a point.
> Most people will not use a desktop board for a cluster.
> Too I/O bound.
> Finally the memory capacity of these desktop boards is pretty limiting.
> Typically 8GB maximum.
>
>
> Generally a XEON or Opteron chipset and CPUs will be the choice.
>
> Also, for most GPU/FPU performance work, the memory bandwidth bottleneck on
> the Intel product is too much of a negative factor.
>
> Lastly, for clusters, most want a rackmount chassis.
> We developed a 2U designed for a server board and 2 GPU boards.
> The big challenge there is power.
>
> We use dual 600W PSUs. One for motherboard, and one for dual GPU boards.
>
>
> --
> With our best regards,
>
> Maurice W. Hilarius         Telephone: 01-780-456-9771
> Hard Data Ltd.                FAX:          01-780-456-9772
> 11060 - 166 Avenue         email:maurice at harddata.com
> Edmonton, AB, Canada         http://www.harddata.com/
>      T5X 1Y3
>
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