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