[Bioclusters] BLAST/ PBS / Grid Engine

[Donald Becker]

On Sat, 18 May 2002, Chris Dagdigian wrote:
> Jeff Layton wrote:
> > However, one of the good things RLX does is provide two cheezy
> > disk drives. You can run RAID-0 across them to gain back some
> > performance. We were doing some tests on a RLX chassis and
> > were going to test this. However, the box had to ship to it's true
> > customer so my play time was over.
>
> Nice. The older RLX system I had a chance to work on was one of the
> early generations: single disk drive, 1GB RAM max and a transmeta CPU.

Even the older RLX blades (the '324 with Transmeta chips) had support
for either two 2.5" drives or a single 3.5" drive.  Using a 3.5" drive
intruded on adjacent slots, so only 12 blades could be fitted.

Most 2.5" drives are significantly slower than 3.5".  Even if faster
2.5" drives were available, it would likely have exceeded the cooling
budget.

The Transmeta-based RLX was a very nice package for web/internet
serving.  One of our partners is Backbone Internet Radio, where we use
our cluster system as a "power amp" to serve about a thousand
independent multimedia streams per node.  That works wonderfully on the
blades.  But without the 1+GHz Transmeta chips that were expected a year
ago, it's not a good box for compute or memory intensive applications.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993