I'm currently shopping around for a cluster-expansion and was shopping for options. Anybody out here who's bought new hardware in the recent past? Any suggestions? Any horror stories?
We've been using Dell SC1435's with Quad-Core AMD 2354 Opterons @ 2.2GHz. 16 Gig RAM. Any new-cutting edge stuff I ought to be asking my vendors to put into the quotes? I already have gigabit bonded backbones and don't think we have the financial muscle to upgrade to Myrinet or Infiniband yet. In the interest of homogeniety and not wanting to have dual trees of executibles I might be tempted to stick with AMDs unless there is compelling temptation otherwise. I am already looking at the CPU benchmarks on the Intel/AMD websites but they can sometimes be misleading / misrepresenting other than the obvious glaring conflict of interest. I rather trust first-hand anecdotal evidence from you guys actually administering them for scientific applications. Unless there is a good third party, relevant database? For some reason the top500 sublists seem skewed to prefer the Intel Xeons. Why so few Opterons or any other AMD hardware? Just curious if this is driven by technological inferiority of only a marketing effect. My vendor seems to be trying to steer me towards an Intel Nehalem or Clovertown for whatever reasons good or bad. Ultimately of course, it might be best if I just got to benchmark my very own application on these CPUs before I bought them. But that's just wishing I guess! -- Rahul _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
