[Beowulf] Opteron/Athlon Clustering

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 01:44:42PM -0500, Jonathan Michael Nowacki wrote:

>   A couple of questions.  Is it possible to have a cluster of Athlons and
> a cluster of Opterons and use them as a whole for 32 bit computing and use
> the Opterons separately for 64 bit computing?  We currently are using 37
> Athlons running Rocks(Linux) and PBS (Portable Batch Systems), and are
> currently looking into buying a cluster of Opterons.

Using PBS, you can give the opterons the "64bit" property, and then
64-bit jobs can ask for "64bit" nodes.

> Also, the people I work for are very wary about buying anything from
> anybody but big name companies like Dell, Compaq/HP, SGI, and IBM.  They
> are worried about total cost of ownership if something breaks.  The only
> problem is none of these companies sells rack-mount Opterons.  What is a
> good company to buy rack-mount (dual and quad) Opterons from?

The IBM e325 is a rack-mount Opteron. Sun's V20z is a rack-mount. The
HP ProLiant DL145 and DL585 are rack-mounts. Those are all top-tier
vendors. In the 2nd tier, pretty much all the vendors have rack-mount
Opterons.

-- greg