custom cluster cabinets (was Re: 1U P4 Systems)

[Douglas Eadline]

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Bari Ari wrote:

--snip--
> I really don't see P4's for dense clusters. ULV PIIIs and Athlon4 with
> SMP makes much more sense. IA-64 with SMP will probably come out ahead
> in MFOPLS per watt and $$. We're working with parts now that offer 160
> MFLOPS per watt vs. 20 MFLOPS per watt on the P4. Fixed point processors
> are down to 1 watt per 1000 Mips.

Keep in mind there is no easy way to correlate dense CPUs or MFLOPS per
watt to actual performance. Packing CPUs in a custom 1U box
may be a big win for some problems, but a big waste of money
for others.

Also, the "lego we use" in the Beowulf community is largely
what is produced for other much larger markets and while we would like
to see some things done differently, there is a reasonable
trade-off between cost/flexibility/performance.

I find it interesting that in all the talk of P4 systems
there is little discussion about the Intel chips-set
for the P4 only supporting 32 PCI. If you need anything
other than Fast Ethernet this could be a real drawback
(i.e. an imbalanced system with bottle necks)
The new Xeon chip set has 2 64-bit slots. Of course there
are other chip-sets on the immediate horizon, but
the market seems to be making a clear differentiation about the
"desktop" vs. "server" product.

Doug

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