[CentOS] Motherboards for HPC applications

Tue Mar 9 03:35:31 UTC 2010
Gordon McLellan <gordonthree at gmail.com>

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Eduardo Grosclaude
<eduardo.grosclaude at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm targeting E5520. I'll buy in Argentina, with a high stack of all
> sort of costs threw upon the product, so budget may not mean much to
> foreigners.
>

Eduardo,

Are you going to be writing your own HPC software, or using some
pre-written cluster aware OS?  Check around to see if Supermicro has a
regional sales center for your local.  They have a new line of servers
setup for GPU based HPC applications... I have no need for such
horsepower, but reading the specs makes me envious none the less:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/7046/SYS-7046GT-TRF.cfm?GPU=TC4

Dual 5500 series cpu (four core each) plus four nVidia Tesla GPU based
supercomputing engines (included).

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.

Gordon