IN CLUSTER COMPUTING, IS THE AMOUNT OF CORE THAT COUNTS?
no. it's the application that counts.
If I build a cluster with 8 motherboards with 1 single core each would it
be the same as using just one motherboard but with two quad core
processors?
of course not. communication among cores on a single board
will certainly be faster than inter-board communication.
it's the application that matters: how frequently do threads/ranks
of the application communicate? are messages small or large?
can the app's communication be formulated as mostly-read sharing of data?
these are all very much properties of the application,
and they determine how suitable any particular hardware will be.
I wanna build one of these but wanna save money and space and
if what counts is the amount of cores to process info I think fewer
motherboards with dual six-core processors is definitely cheaper just
because I wont be needing that many mothers power supplies etc. thanks
power supplies aren't your main concern, since good ones are about 93%
efficient. but going with more-core systems is, in general, a good idea.
mainly for amortization reasons: probably fewer disks, extraneous sutff
like video interfaces, fewer parts to fail, fewer systems to administer, etc.
there can be disadvantages to more-core systems too, since some of the parts
being shared (amortized) may be performance bottlenecks.
the sweet spots depends on what systems are in volume production -
right now, 2-socket systems are the right building block in most cases.
4-socket systems would be attractive, but they tend to ship in so much
lower volume that their price is nonlinearly high. 1-socket servers
tend to cost more than half a 2-socket (where "server" means at least
"has ECC memory" - that is, not a desktop.)
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