On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Lux, James P wrote:
I think the model that John Vert mentioned, using it as a software development workstation to try things out before running on the "big iron" is actually probably a more likely scenario. And for that, you might not want the full up configuration, just enough to make it a "real" cluster so you can work out the interprocessor communications issues.
Which is fine, if the "big iron" (more likely "big bad wulf":-) you want is running the same interconnect, etc. In which case as few as two blades might work, but then, so would two towers at about the same footprint (in all dimensions) and half the cost. A bladed system full, well, that makes sense of a sort as it is the only way to get that density, sort of, except as Mark pointed out the advantage isn't quite as pronounced as perhaps it once was. A bladed system with two or three blades and five or six empty slots? That's just plain dumb. Even my desk, swollen as it is with the flood of papers I'll get around looking at the day Satan goes snow skiing down the slopes of hell, can be trivially rearranged to add two more mid-towers to the one that is already there and a small network interface. In fact, I've got three mid-tower chassis (two of them dead) sitting in my office anyway. I could probably build myself a 17 core development cluster out of spare parts and a couple of new motherboard/CPU/memory sets for $4K, or spend even less on just single quad motherboards and a better network for 9 cores. As is all too often true, a niche product has narrow boundaries on the places it SANELY makes sense, although naturally that is almost irrelevant to the issue of marketing it. And hey, Penguin's "blade center" is awfully pretty and awfully high density if one ever could afford to buy it fully populated. One of my earliest personal cases of optimism was buying an $80K SGI 220S (think of it as a "very early bladed server" the size of a refrigerator and drawing anywhere from 1-3 KW) with just one dual CPU blade, thinking we'd eventually get more at $20-30K/blade. Ha ha ha. We sold it six or so years later for $3000, when we could get over the counter Sparcstations that were STILL expensive at $5K or thereabouts but which were even faster. But people do buy them -- grab a copy of PC Mag or Linux Mag (now sorta-defunct?) or whatever and leaf it. What do you find? Lots of ads for rackmounts. A few ads for consumer systems (but not that many anymore, outside of laptops). And yeah, quite a few ads for bladeservers. Just not USUALLY for cluster computing, I don't think, at least by people on this list, which is a last bastion for non-turnkey beowulfery where we always ask ourselves if it is better to buy a prettier and niftier system or get more processors, and almost invariably select "more processors" in an uglier form factor when we find it. :-) rgb
Jim
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