[Beowulf] non-proprietary IPMI card?

[Mark Hahn]

> When comparing cluster offerings, seems reasonable, that the additional 
> $85-$100 would be factored in to any system/cluster purchase, for at least 
> power up/down and reset?  This is astonishing, or is there something I'm 
> missing in this thread? The technology mentioned isn't really earth

depends on the scale and environment.  when I built my first cluster
(started at ~48 nodes), I had controllable power and a serial network for
bios/console. I never actually wired up the latter, and once the system
stabilized, actually removed the controllable power.

for small clusters (<= few racks), neither should really be necessary, since 
your hang/crash rate should be very low.  if you have quite fat nodes, 
the marginal cost becomes negligable, though, and worth the convenience.
for larger clusters (say, >256 nodes), even occasional manual fiddling is 
dubious - may still be OK if you have lots of people.

my organization has ~2500 nodes, many remote, and ~5 admins who need to spend
most of their time doing systems/net/storage/web programming, etc.  so it's
pretty important to avoid a lot of driving and/or labor-intensive operations...