I have my eye on just such a machine (an older Cisco UCS C460 M2 with 4 x Xeon E7-4870 (10 core)). I'll know tomorrow if I was outbid or not. It is in my local area and shipping is high, so hopefully.
> Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2020 18:14:00 -0600 > From: Jonathan Douglas Engwall <engwalljonathanther...@gmail.com> > To: Mark Kosmowski <mark.kosmow...@gmail.com>, "beowulf@beowulf.org" > <beowulf@beowulf.org> > Subject: Re: [Beowulf] First cluster in 20 years - questions about > today > Message-ID: <1aehm2g2apv52ollgrey2doa.1580775240...@email.android.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > At least get a 4U, 4 CPU rack machine and don't even think of any GPU > older than 2016. Better yet, look toward a DELL T440, they sell off when > the warranty starts to go, practically new, at prices that will shock you; > if you have paid for a laptop or phone recently. > Industrial cast-offs are the way to go. You can try whatever you like that > way, because you are running solid equipment. > You can't protect yourself when a developer dumps support for this or that > when everything you use is older, edge-case, or your own handiwork, > professional it may be. > > Jonathan Engwall > > On February 1, 2020, at 9:21 PM, Mark Kosmowski <mark.kosmow...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > I've been out of computation for about 20 years since my master degree. > I'm getting into the game again as a private individual. When I was active > Opteron was just launched - I was an early adopter of amd64 because I > needed the RAM (maybe more accurately I needed to thoroughly thrash my swap > drives). I never needed any cluster management software with my 3 node, > dual socket, single core little baby Beowulf. (My planned domain is > computational chemistry and I'm hoping to get to a point where I can do ab > initio catalyst surface reaction modeling of small molecules (not > biomolecules).) > > > I'm planning to add a few nodes and it will end up being fairly > heterogenous. My initial plan is to add two or three multi-socket, > multi-core nodes as well as a 48 port gigabit switch. How should I assess > whether to have one big heterogenous cluster vs. two smaller > quasi-homogenous clusters? > > > Will it be worthwhile to learn a cluster management software? If so, > suggestions? > > > Should I consider Solaris or illumos? I do plan on using ZFS, especially > for the data node, but I want as much redundancy as I can get, since I'm > going to be using used hardware. Will the fancy Solaris cluster tools be > useful? > > > Also, once I get running, while I'm getting current with theory and > software may I inquire here about taking on a small, low priority academic > project to make sure the cluster side is working good? > > > Thank you all for still being here! >
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