On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Lux, James P wrote:
I think there's a B-school thesis in this topic. It sure would be interesting, especially if you had a decent modeling tool that would let you plug in cost of money, funding profiles, etc.
I agree. Of the various columns and articles I've written, the ones on infrastructure are among the most enduringly popular. I was quite recently contacted by an exec from a "large manufacturer of PCs" who asked permission to use one of them in internal corporate planning discussions. This is right in the sweet spot of model complexity. The dimensionality of the problem is order of ten -- not unmanageably high -- and there is fairly solid data to support model parameters. I am reminded of one of my own all-time favorite documents, let's see, what was it called, something like: Configuration and Capacity Planning for Sun Servers It looks like there may be an update of it called C&SP for Solaris Servers out there somewhere. Dunno about that, but the original was fabulous -- I had (maybe still have if I look for it) a hard copy as well as a PS image (postscript because this was back in the early 90's or late 80's). Didn't have an actual model, but has most of the parameters for one. Still didn't focus enough on infrastructure requirements, though, or optimum rollover replacement. Back then servers were UBERexpensive, though, so the rule was "use them until they fall apart". We started with a Sun 4/110 server in maybe 1985 or 1986, upgraded it to a Sun 4/310 (motherboard replacement, same chassis) in 1990-something) and ran it until we got serious and bought an actual multiprocessor server in 1993 or 1994. In fact we kept running it even then for a couple more years but the new server ran NFS and provided all of the disk and much of the management. Now, of course Linux has forced the commoditization of servers so that Sun cannot charge the absurd margins that they did back then (bad, perhaps, but not AS bad). rgb
Jim
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:r...@phy.duke.edu _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
