[Beowulf] Building new cluster - estimate

[Perry E. Metzger]

John Hearns <john.hearns at streamline-computing.com> writes:
> On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 10:00 -0500, Jon Aquilina wrote:
>> my 2 cents bout ssd and i bet alot of you would agree. they are not
>> worth the money yet for the amount of storage space that you are
>> getting. i have seen at fry's electronics yesterday 1tb hdd for 200
>> dollars? why go for something that u get 32gb or 64gb max
>
> Because, in (almost) the words of Soho clip joint doormen:
> "Naked - and they don't move"

The name of the game is price/performance. If you're paying for power,
a cluster is garbage after a few years anyway because the power costs
alone justify buying new machines. If you're using boxes only for 2 or
3 years, the MTBF of hard drives is low enough that you're better off
with el cheapo $30/80GB hard drives and a few extras to keep on the
shelf and throw in when the ones in use break, rather than an
expensive flash based SSD. There may be rare exceptions where the low
latency seeks of the SSD provide enough extra performance to justify
the cost, but they're not common in these sorts of apps. (Not common
does not mean "do not exist".)

Perry