[Beowulf] noobs: what comes next?

[Mark Hahn]

> If I buy a 100 USD Gigabit switch, 3 HDDs (10000 RPM and about 160 GB)

so a $100 Gb switch should get you ~12 ports.  why in Amdahl's name
would you waste your money on 10k rpm disks, especially when in your 
previous breath you were talking about power?  maybe I should have 
said Moore's name, since disk technology, being an areal process like
IC density, is scaling exponentially.  that means that modern disks 
already provide more bandwidth than you can use.  there's a good 
argument for high-rpm disks if you have an inherently seeky workload,
but I really don't think CFD is.

> what's best for me, with no experience in price/performance ratios of
> current COTS hardware or detailed knowledge of benchmarking.

considered as bare chips, atom's flops/power is probably not bad.
once you factor in the support chips...  core2 or k10-generation systems
will be fast, cool and cheap.