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