On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 01:52 -0400, Mark Hahn wrote: > > > 2. reasonably fast interconnect (IB SDR 10Gb/s would suffice our > > computational needs (running LAMMPs molecular dynamics and VASP DFT codes) > > 3. 48U rack (preferably with good thermal management) > > "thermal management"? servers need cold air in front and unobstructed > exhaust. that means open or mesh front/back (and blanking panels). > Agreed. However depending on the location if space is tight you could think of an APC rack with the heavy fan exhaust door on th rear, and vent the hot air.
> > - 2x Intel Xeon E5420 Hapertown 2.5 GHz quad core CPU : 2x$350=$700 > > - Dual LGA 771 Intel 5400 Supermicro mb : > > $430 I'd recommend looking at the Intel Twin motherboard systems for this project. Leaves plenty of room for cluster head node, and RAID arrays, a UPS and switches. Supermicro have these motherboards with onboard Infiniband, so no need for extra cards. One thing you have to think about is power density - it is no use cramming 40 1U systems into a rack plus switches and head nodes - it is going to draw far too many amps. Think two times APC PDUs per cabinet at the very maximum. The Intel twins help here again, as they have a high efficiency PSU and the losses are shared between two systems. I'm not sure if we would still have to spread this sort of load between two racks - it depends on the calculations. You also need to put in some budget for power - importantly - air conditioning. > > In principle, we have some experience in building and managing clusters, but > > with 40 node systems it would make sense to get a good cluster integrator to > > do the job. Can people share their recent experiences and recommend reliable > > vendors to deal with? Our standard build would be an APC rack, IPMI in all compute nodes plus two networked APC PDUs. John Hearns _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
