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