[CentOS] Motherboards for HPC applications
John R Pierce
pierce at hogranch.com
Tue Mar 9 04:08:51 UTC 2010
Eduardo Grosclaude wrote:
> Hello,
> Can somebody recommend CentOS-OK, dual socket motherboards for compute
> elements?
for real numeric stuff (as opposed to things like video processing that
utilizes sse3), the AMD processors often outperform Intel. current AMD
dual socket server processors have SIX cores each, but I dunno who's on
top of the performance curve this year. The Intel I7 family, including
the E5500 server chips, are screamers. what really counts in large HPC
clusters is gigaflop/$$$
a number of vendors make 1U chassis designed to hold TWO compact dual
processor server boards so you can get 2 nodes per U, but if you go this
route, you really have to watch your cooling and power (50 or 60 of
these in a rack means you'll have a REALLY high power/thermal load per
rack). An example such board is
http://www.intel.com/products/server/motherboards/S5500HV/S5500HV-overview.htm
with the Intel E55xx series, you want to populate your memory 6 dimms at
a time (assuming two CPUs), using 2gb or 4gb dimms, for max performance
(each processor has 3 memory channels)
for a high performance compute cluster, you'll probably want to use
management software like Oscar, which integrates system management with
MPI based distributed computing such that you can manage a cluster of
100s of servers like its a single big system
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