[Beowulf] Three notes from ISC 2006

[Erik Paulson]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 04:25:40PM -0400, Patrick Geoffray wrote:
> 
> I just hope this will be picked up by an academic that can convince 
> vendors to donate. Tax break is usually a good incentive for that :-)
> 

How much care should be given to the selection of the nodes? Performance
is a function of both the nodes and the interconnect - so while your 
test cluster allows for direct comparisons of the interconnects it's only
for a cluster of AMD processors, or for Intel processors. 

I could imagine there would be academic sites that would host this
thing, and possibly even spring for the nodes, provided that the
interconnects were donated and they got to use it when it's not in
use (and probably had some promise that no more than X% of the time
would the cluster be in "benchmark" mode)

-Erik, not legally authorized to volunteer the University of Wisconsin to
host any such thing.