Hi all, We are looking at buying a fairly large cluster (several hundred nodes) next year. If you have any thoughts on the following questions, could you please share them? 1. What are your top three cluster vendors in terms of hardware reliability and support? 2. Has anyone used IBM/HP/Sun blades in Linux clusters? Are there any blade-specific problems? (Eg, overheating, bottlenecks in chassis throughput...) 3. Is anyone using (happily) a half-U non-blade solution? (Meaning two dual-CPU machines in a 1-U space.) If yes, who is the vendor? 4. What is your favorite method of file sharing for hundreds of nodes? I tested PVFS over a year ago, but it was slow and unreliable. Now there also are OpenGFS and Lustre... Are there any hardware solutions for this which don't cost insane amounts of money (like SAN connection on every node)? 5. I saw the recent thread about problems with Opterons. How close in your opinion are they to production use? How about Itaniums? I see on the web a lot of press releases about Itanium clusters, but very few real-life stories. Has anyone heard of 64-bit CPUs on blades in the pipeline? Thanks a lot, Simon -- Simon (Vsevolod ILyushchenko) simonf@cshl.edu http://www.simonf.com America's business leaders simply don't want to think about complex technology issues - they want to think about golf. Microsoft promises them that. Andrew Grygus, www.aaxnet.com