[CentOS] Motherboards for HPC applications

Wed Mar 10 00:37:04 UTC 2010
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:

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

I don't think I can, but it is competitive with Dell and HP
as an example while the innovation put into the cloud rack
is far beyond anything Dell or HP offer to mere mortals.
Closest HP offers is the "SL" series of systems which are
pretty decent, though offer roughly half the density as
SGI for our particular application.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF02a/15351-15351-3896136.html?jumpid=re_R295_prodexp/busproducts/computing-server/proliant-sl-scalable-sys&psn=servers

Dell is coming out with something new soon

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/03/dell_cloudedge/

I've seen them, and honestly aren't all that creative, very
similar to Supermicro Twin. They are decent for CPU and
memory intensive stuff, but not as good for (local) I/O
intensive. They seem pretty proud about these systems though
considering Supermicro has had similar stuff on the market
for quite some time now there isn't much to get excited about
IMO.

SGI(formerly Rackable) has been pretty aggressive in patenting
their designs, which is probably what lead to vendors like
Supermicro building their "Twin" systems.

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/rs/2007/05082007.html

Dell has a custom design division which they can probably do
some pretty crazy things but I'm told they have a ~1,500
server minimum to get anything from that group.

nate