On 5/29/2014 1:11 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 2:13 PM,<m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: >>> > > >> >As a comparison, the Penguins that we got a couple-three years ago were in >> >the $11k range, and were 1U Supermicros. The Dell and HP I'm looking at >> >are about $13k, so that's around where I'm looking. > HP blades pop up with a list price around $12k. If you need enough to > fill a chassis (and can get a discount), I'd think that would come out > in the same neighborhood. the blade chassis infrastructure is expensive. for supercomputing, the cheap cloud tray computers are probably much more cost effective. bunches of folks, HP and Dell included, are making server trays that have 2 or more complete nodes per 2U chassis, much cheaper than traditional blades, like the Dell C microservers. I *am* kind of surprised at the 64 core per node thing, single large nodes like that are more typically used as enterprise database servers where you have 100s/1000s of clients doing SQL queries concurrently... What the geophysicists at my son's U are using for seismic processing and such are racks of 2 socket machines with a pair of NVidia Cuda processors each to do the numeric heavy lifting. if those 64 processor servers are like $14000 or whatever, I think I'd buy 18 of these instead :D http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProLiant-DL180-G6-2U-2X-XEON-HC-X5650-2-66GHz-12xTRAYS-24GB-P410-RAID-512MB-/261448081851 (ok, that particular chassis is setup as a storage server, with 14 drive bays on a raid card, but you can find lots of similar things in various configurations) -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast