[Beowulf] AMD quad-core recommendations

[Bill Broadley]

Eugen Leitl wrote:
 > I used to use an X2100 M2 Sun box as a staple, but for some unfathomable
> reason Sun decided to jack up the dual-core barebone price by 300+ EUR.
> Real smart move, that. 

Yeah, kind of strange.  Apparently they aren't "real" sun's, just sun stickers
over the Tyan motherboard.  I didn't notice till I added an IPMI card and the
bootup mentioned that said IPMI card was a tyan.  Not sure if I bought the M2
model or not.  In any case at sub $800 it was a pretty good value.

> If anyone is familiar with a nice cheap Phenom/Phenom II 1U rackmount barebone 
> of about 65 cm depth which which can take unbuffered DIMMs and 2-4 SATA 
> drives (I could survive without IPMI, I guess) you would be my absolute hero.

I'm kinda surprised single socket servers aren't more common, seems relatively
common for disk, network, or in Intel's case memory bandwidth to be the
bottleneck, especially with today's dual socket quads.

I did see Pogo (I've no financial interest in them) has 3 1U core i7 (single
socket) servers at:
    http://www.pogolinux.com/products/intel_servers?no=775216

I was pleased to see that they do support ECC memory, and that 1333 MHz ECC
memory seems to be available.