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?
I think the answer depends on time-frame. if you're bw-sensitive,
you go nehalem for the time being. for the near future, I'm interested
to see how AMD's next-gen "istanbul" works out. AMD obviously needs
to break out past ddr2/800 - it would be kind of surprising if they
went 6c/socket without some improvement. AMD has made a big deal
about the cache snooping, but I'm not sure how much it matters for
the main market (2-socket). if you're considering 4-socket, I'd
certainly think about whether to wait for istanbul.
We've been using Dell SC1435's with Quad-Core AMD 2354 Opterons @
2.2GHz. 16 Gig RAM.
2G/core seems to be fairly safe. although it's overkill for a lot of
users, ram is also pretty cheap - 6x 4G dimms for dual-i7 is probably
pretty sensible.
_______________________________________________
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
