[Beowulf] dollars-per-teraflop : any lists like the Top500?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Joe Landman
<landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> Heh ... I deleted that section of one of my responses.  There isn't a lot of
> data to support the notion that they will go out into the world and buy the
> same stuff.  They will often go for the best deals.
>

People will only have a limited number of vendors on their list when
they get quotes and compare specs. etc. And the sort of prestige
branding does make you more likely to get on the list of vendors
people will consider for a particular project.

e.g I imagine there are at least 20 different HPC vendors (if not
more) that would sell the kind of equipment that went into our latest
cluster upgrade. How many did I actually talk to? Maybe 7. (Maybe
others are more diligent than I am)  And this is the sort of
subjective decision that will get made on the basis of reputation and
familiarity.

Word-of-mouth counts a lot too. If there is a Vendor-X that nobody on
Campus has ever worked with there is a far more uphill battle to
convince the decision makers to give them a chance. The reasons have
to  be pretty compelling.

-- 
Rahul