[Beowulf] What is the right lubricant for computer rack sliding rails?yh

[Greg Lindahl]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 06:14:42AM -0500, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> It's really the difference between a HPC cluster and most business
> clusters.  HPC nodes go in, and they don't come out.  Unless they break,
> and if you get high quality nodes, breaking is unlikely.

Most business clusters are like HPC clusters in this respect.

I'm a bit different, but in my business, computing is a large fraction of
our total spending, not a rounding error.

> And don't forget the ten or twenty minutes of human labor required to
> mount the nodes on the rails, one at a time.

The guys I hire to do this come to $18/node. And that's with charging
me $100/hour/person. And we use cage nuts. So if you're spending a lot
more time than this, you're using the wrong people.

(After the first 100 cage nuts, even I got really good at inserting
and popping them out... 'prolly should wear eye protection while doing
it, though :-) KaPow! KaPow! KaPow!)

-- greg