[CentOS] Motherboards for HPC applications

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 08:09:57PM -0800, nate wrote:
> 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.
> 

Wow, pretty cool system. Can you tell about the pricing? 

-- Pasi