[CentOS] Motherboards for HPC applications

[nate]

Gordon McLellan wrote:

> If your application can't support GPU based processing, I think
> Peter's suggestion is most fitting.  Load up a rack of dual socket
> 5520 servers from Dell or HP and then save some money by building your
> own shared-storage to feed the cluster.  The big vendors crank out
> very inexpensive dual socket xeon servers, the only area they really
> seem to be price gouging in right now is storage.

For me I have been working on spec'ing out a "HPC" cluster to run
Hadoop on large amounts of data and fell in love with the SGI
Cloud Rack C2.

I managed to come up with a configuration that had roughly 600
CPU cores, 1.2TB of memory and 300 1TB SATA disks in a single rack
and consumes ~16,000 watts of power with 99% efficient rack level
power supplies and N+1 power redundancy, rack level cooling as well.
Very cost effective as well at least for larger scale deployments,
assuming you have a data center that can support such density.

http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/cloudrack/cloudrackc2.html

My current data center does not support such density so I came up
with a configuration of 320 CPU cores, 640GB memory, and 160x1TB
disks that fit in a single 24U rack, and consumes roughly 8,000
watts(208V 30A 3-phase) and weighs in at just under 1,200 pounds
(everything included).

Systems come fully racked, cabled & ready to plug in. Systems
are built with commodity components wherever possible(MB/ram/CPU/HD),
only custom stuff is the enclosure, cooling, and power distribution,
which is how they achieve the extreme densities and power
efficiency.

nate