[Beowulf] MS Cray

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 at 8:22am, Gerry Creager wrote

> Gus Correa wrote:
>> 
>> Here is the link to the  CX1 on the Cray web site:
>> 
>> http://www.cray.com/products/CX1.aspx
>> 
>> You need MS Explorer to customize/price it.
>
> I just knew you had to be wrong, but sure enough, I can't see config options. 
> It's a show stopper for me.  If I need IE to buy the system, it's not likely 
> to happen until A) there's an IE that runs natively on *nix, and B) it 
> doesn't have the myriad problems associated with IE in the past.

Hrm -- WORKSFORME using FF3 on Fedora 9.  Notably, Cray is happy to sell 
the CX1 to you sans OS.  W2K8 is a $3752 option (at least in my sample 
config with 8 compute blades).  As was noted, the Linux they suggest is 
"Red Hat Linux", by which one would assume they mean RHEL (why does 
everybody make that mistake -- there hasn't been a "Red Hat Linux" since 
RH9 (shudder)).

Also, as one would expect, the hardware premium is hefty.  A compute blade 
with dual Xeon E5462s, 16GB RAM (8x2GB), and an 80GB HDD is $6656. 
Without even trying too hard I can get a similarly configured 1U node for 
$4400.  So that's a 50% markup on nodes, not to mention the almost $9K for 
the chassis.  Of course, that's before any discounts.

Maybe it's my miserly ways, but I just don't see the value proposition 
here...

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF