[Beowulf] motherboard recommendations?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:26:17AM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> I'm specing out a small cluster this week, and I'm looking for
> recommendations on decent, inexpensive server mother boards. Important
> features are handling reasonably recent Intel dual or quad core

I'm not sure why you're excluding Opteron/Phenom a priori.
I would at the very least benchmark the (QM?) applications on each
architecture, using proper optimization. Also, price/performance
ratio instead of absolute performance might be relevant.

> processors, 8G of ECC memory, decent disk controller, decent onboard
> NICs -- onboard IPMI and the like would be a plus.

SunFire X2100 M2 are not bare motherboards, but IIRC a complete
barebone sells for about 470 EUR sans VAT. IPMI, 8 GByte ECC, 4 GBit NICs
(unfortunately, 2x nForce and 2x Broadcom). Only dual-core at the 
moment, but that's bound to change in a month or two. Optional
riser board can take x16 PCIe if you're considering CUDA & Co
a later option.

(Disclaimer: I don't sell them, but I use them).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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