[Beowulf] MS Cray

[Lux, James P]

From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Joshua Baker-LePain
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 9:24 AM
To: Gerry Creager
Cc: Beowulf
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] MS Cray

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 at 8:22am, Gerry Creager wrote

> Gus Correa wrote:
>>
>> Here is the link to the  CX1 on the Cray web site:
>>
>> http://www.cray.com/products/CX1.aspx
>>
>> You need MS Explorer to customize/price it.
>
> I just knew you had to be wrong, but sure enough, I can't see config options.
> It's a show stopper for me.  If I need IE to buy the system, it's not
> likely to happen until A) there's an IE that runs natively on *nix,
> and B) it doesn't have the myriad problems associated with IE in the past.

Hrm -- WORKSFORME using FF3 on Fedora 9.  Notably, Cray is happy to sell the CX1 to you sans OS.  W2K8 is a $3752 option (at least in my sample config with 8 compute blades).  As was noted, the Linux they suggest is "Red Hat Linux", by which one would assume they mean RHEL (why does everybody make that mistake -- there hasn't been a "Red Hat Linux" since
RH9 (shudder)).

Also, as one would expect, the hardware premium is hefty.  A compute blade with dual Xeon E5462s, 16GB RAM (8x2GB), and an 80GB HDD is $6656.
Without even trying too hard I can get a similarly configured 1U node for $4400.  So that's a 50% markup on nodes, not to mention the almost $9K for the chassis.  Of course, that's before any discounts.

Maybe it's my miserly ways, but I just don't see the value proposition here...
--

Noise?
Packaging?
Nobody ever got fired for buying Cray?