[Beowulf] building a new cluster

[Mark Hahn]

> Only one comment about the compute platform.  I'd strongly urge you to
> test and compare dual Opterons before settling on the Xeons.  If

yes, as well as whether gigabit will be reasonable for your MPI jobs.

> away a Xeon for nearly any application.  Where YMMV, of course, and
> caveat emptor, etc.

very cache-friendly apps tend to scale more with clock, and thus
run nicely on xeons.

> or if you just want a neat look, you might go with rackmount systems, in
> which case the whole cluster would probably fit into a single rack.  You

I'd also strongly suggest getting systems with net IPMI; being able to 
reset/poweron/poweroff nodes remotely is really very nice.  ones I've got
(HP DL145's) also let you collect temperature info much more nicely 
than with lm-sensors.

regards, mark hahn.