[Beowulf] Keeping the Athlon MP cluster limping along

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Andrew Piskorski wrote:

> I have a Tyan Tiger MP S2460 dual Athlon MP workstation that has given
> me no problems at all, but then, I don't use it with cluster-like
> workloads either.

We have a stack (or had, we may finally have pitched them) of close to
100 of these pieces of crap.  These are what we bought the 2466's to
replace, as they are actually BETTER than 2460's.  They still haven't
got the bios right in the 2466's, but the 2460 bios -- just don't get me
started.

We are still, shall we say, "sensitive" about purchasing Tyan products
at this point.  Although they have been pretty good about replacing all
the 2466 motherboards that have fried for no visible reason in the last
year or so.

Counting the days, we are.  I've got 16 nodes that have to last another
year; somebody else has 32 or so nodes that might have to do a bit more
than that (to get to 3 years), and a third group here is actually right
at 3 years, although part of that time was spent with 2460's before we
spent several thousand dollars replacing them all with 2466's.

At 3 years max (sooner if people get new grant money for Opterons) those
nodes will be outa here slicker than a greased goose.  Or some other
fast metaphor.

   rgb

> 
> 

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu