[Beowulf] HPC Market Question

[Toon Moene]

Douglas Eadline wrote:

> Fellow HPC types:
> 
> I have been running a micro-poll over at
> Linux Magazine asking about how the
> economy has effected your 2009 plans.

A (somewhat) related question.

In December 2007 I bought a quad core home PC (actually, if you go by 
the labels on it, it's meant for teenagers to store their 
pirated^H^H^H^H^Hdownloaded movies and songs on).

It functions perfectly for running test versions (top-of-trunk) of our 
Weather Forecasting code, using Debian testing, Open-MPI and GNU Fortran 
on the grid we used until October 2006 operationally at the Dutch 
Weather Service.

Normally, I would retire this machine end-of-2010 (3 years is a 
reasonable time period for the economic viability of a computer).

However, I haven't seen any progress in capabilities in home computers 
in the past 14 months (other than that most are now sold *standard* with 
4 Gbyte - apparently 64-bit Vista is now a "working" option).

So what I'm thinking of is to replace it in 2010-2011 with a blade solution.

But I have no idea how to price these things.  If I want to spend 
roughly the same amount of money I spent on this home machine (1000-1200 
Euros), what can I expect ?

Thanks for you insight ...

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon at moene.org (*NEW*) - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html