hi,
This seems ideal mainboard for beowulf clusters. built in infiniband
it seems.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Arima-AMD-Opteron-Quad-Core-Socket-F-3000-series-
Server_W0QQitemZ390149471460QQcmdZViewItemQQptZCOMP_EN_Networking_Compon
ents?hash=item5ad6b87ce4
they get offered regurarly and cheap.
on ebay a while ago 10 of 'em got offered:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?
ViewItem&item=360198390884&ssPageName=ADME:X:RTQ:US:1123
The problem is no manufacturer lists these boards and which PSU fits
on it and what cpu's is unclear.
that's not a good way to build a cluster huh?
well suppose there is a psu that works, then that's ideal to build a
cluster with. those barcelona cores do like $40 - $90
a piece on ebay now.
So most expensive part of the machine is the DDR2- ECC-reg ram. Some
'cheap offers' on ebay regrettably are not ecc-reg
despite what the description.
For the coming time of course pricewise nothing beats 16 core AMD's.
Those cpu's way faster than i had thought.
Intel is too expensive second hand simply and always will be, as they
are very good in marketing their hardware as being fast,
despite that already for like half a decade they have no good 4
socket platform getting sold (if we forget about Dunnington -
that thing is too expensive anyway still so let's forget about
Dunnington).
intel and amd seem to have canned all type of new cpu's. i read now
nehalem-ex is just 6 cores, no longer 8 and 2.26Ghz,
so that's not so interesting as IPC wise for well written software
you can mathematical prove that AMD is nearly same speed.
If intel has that problem i suppose amd won't have a 12 core version
of their chip any soon, besides those are like $2k a piece
the highend versions. Too much.
At least for my software the barcelona's are way faster than i had
thought.
DDR3 is a lot faster latency of course than DDR2, but the total cpu
speed is what counts in first place and the price
you can get it for.
Considering testreports of those 8 core cpu's i guess we won't see
them soon. What was it 700mm^2?
They can't produce those in times like this i guess. Too expensive,
no company wants to buy that.
So hence my quest for cheap alternatives :)
sorry for off-topic posting. guess though more of you are looking for
cheap clusters.
Seems NASA has to size down also nowadays, so no more intel hardware
for it in future either i bet.
Vincent
_______________________________________________
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
