[Beowulf] recommendations for cluster upgrades

[Jan Heichler]

Hallo Rahul,

where are you "based"? If you are in Europe we (ClusterVision) can definitely help you out with benchmarks and quotes... 

Go to www.clustervision.com for further information...

Jan

Dienstag, 12. Mai 2009, meintest Du:

RN> I'm currently shopping around for a cluster-expansion and was shopping
RN> for options. Anybody out here who's bought new hardware in the  recent
RN> past? Any suggestions? Any horror stories?

RN> We've been using Dell SC1435's with Quad-Core AMD 2354 Opterons @
RN> 2.2GHz. 16 Gig RAM.

RN> Any new-cutting edge stuff I ought to be asking my vendors to put into
RN> the quotes? I already have gigabit bonded backbones and don't think we
RN> have the financial muscle to upgrade to Myrinet or Infiniband yet. In
RN> the interest of homogeniety and not wanting to have dual trees of
RN> executibles I might be tempted to stick with AMDs unless there is
RN> compelling temptation otherwise.

RN> I am already looking at the CPU benchmarks on the Intel/AMD websites
RN> but they can sometimes be misleading / misrepresenting other than the
RN> obvious glaring conflict of interest. I rather trust first-hand
RN> anecdotal evidence from you guys actually administering them for
RN> scientific applications. Unless there is a good third party, relevant
RN> database?

RN> For some reason the top500 sublists seem skewed to prefer the Intel
RN> Xeons. Why so few Opterons or any other AMD hardware? Just curious if
RN> this is driven by technological inferiority of only a marketing
RN> effect. My vendor seems to be trying to steer me towards an Intel
RN> Nehalem or Clovertown for whatever reasons good or bad.

RN> Ultimately of course, it might be best if I just got to benchmark my
RN> very own application on these CPUs before I bought them. But that's
RN> just wishing I guess!




Bye Jan                            
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20090513/a096fa6f/attachment.html>