[Bioclusters] (no subject)

Michael Hanulec bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Sun, 4 Apr 2004 20:12:29 -0400 (EDT)


(.... sorry for the delayed response..)

> Basically... buy Xeon || AMD two way boxes. Be boring, look at Dell or
> penguin computing or something. Dont bother with 64 bit. Think about that in
> about 2 years time. It will irritate you in 2 months after you buy it, *i
> promise*.

you can also often find a white-box manufacture which is willing to let
you remotely evalute a compriable Xeon DP and AMD Series 2xx machine to
run your code on to perform pre-sales tests.

> Dont buy from some indy very cheap manufacturer, cause, if the nodes will
> fail, you will be left waiting... or make them give you a decent guarantee.
> Or a big box of bits.

my answers is slightly biased.. as i work for a white-box vendor now but
in my past life as a unix sysadmin i've bought from the big guys and the
small guys who had past cluster experience and i've ALWAYS had better luck
with the small guys.  you will often find the small guys providing you
with a more complete solution, instead of just a bunch of hardware and the
option to buy a consulting services to perform the software installs.

> Look at the price of the chip : speed ratio. This graph will have an
> inflection point, at which more money input gives diminishing returns
> speed-wise. Buy at this inflection point. This changes all the time... of
> course. There is no point in buying the *best* out there right this second.
> Just buy a little behind it, and buy an extra box or two.
>
> Find out what you want to run.
> Buy as enough memory so it doesn't thrash your disks. (Or just fill it with
> memory).
>
> Spending about 2 grand (USD) on them a piece (I dont know what that is in
> Lira) should buy you something decent operating at 3 gigs, with a couple of
> gigs ram.

otherwise ... i agree with the following recommendations, especially the
$2K per dual proc server price point.

> Then have a look at
> http://bioinformatics.org/biobrew/
> www.rocksclusters.org/

don't forget:

http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/

http://www.warewulf-cluster.org/

-mike
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