[Bioclusters] SGI Altics or Beowulf w/OpenMOSIX?

[Rayson Ho]

I would vote for a COTS cluster.

Embarrassingly-parallel jobs do not really need a low latency, high
bandwidth interconnect - Gigabit Ethernet will do the job very well.

So the only thing Altix can provide is the low system admin overhead.
There are several ways to workaround this on the cluster, for example,
with Rocks cluster, the slave nodes get the images and configurations
from the master node, and you only have 1 configuration to deal with.

http://rocks.npaci.edu/Rocks/

With the type of job (BLAST, or other bio-related workload), OpenMOSIX
is not needed, but instead, just use Gridengine that comes with
Rockscluster, it is very efficient, and you can do better accounting
with SGE than just a bare Altix.

Also, even Intel is giving up the Itanium and following AMD64... and I
believe for your workload, a cluster of Opteron will do a better job
than the brain-dead IA64.

Rayson

--- "Jonathan B. Horen" <horen@mail.iucc.ac.il> wrote:
> IIRC, most bioinformatics jobs are of the "embarrassingly-parallel" 
> variety, and better suited to a COTS-cluster running GNU/Linux with
> the OpenMOSIX extensions.


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