[Beowulf] Supermicro 2U

[Huw Lynes]

On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 16:10 +0000, John Hearns wrote:
> It is a tad lame to repeat articles from HPCwire here, but I can't help it.
> New. Shiny. http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/2UTwin2.cfm
> 
> The nice thing is that the motherboards are hot-swap from the rear -
> so these things
> offer the best of both worlds if blade servers and discreet rackable servers.
> I make this 32 cores in 2U - heck of a lot of CPU power. If you could
> stand the racket it would sit nicely
> under your desk.

We use the Supermicro 1U twins here at Cardiff. The worst thing about
them is that if you have to take down one side of a twin (e.g to replace
memory or an IPMI card) you have to take down the other side as well.

So if the documentation is correct these 2U boxes have the advantage of
being able to work on any of the 4 mainboards without bringing down the
whole chassis. That would be a big win for us if the price of these new
boxes isn't significantly greater than the 1U twins.

Cheers,
Huw

-- 
Huw Lynes                       | Advanced Research Computing
HEC Sysadmin                    | Cardiff University
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