[Beowulf] Building new cluster - estimate

[Ivan Oleynik]

Mark,

if space is not a big deal, why are you even thinking about rack-mount?
>

40 nodes is too much. Even if room is spacious, we do not want to mess up
with boxes as we did in the past.


>
> nothing special about Intel twins afaik - AMD twins are comparable.
> but it seems even sillier to go with twin systems since you say space is
> not tight, and you'd be just creating a hotter hot-spot to cool.
> (ultimately, of course, 40 nodes dissipate about the same amount regardless
> of formfactor, and you need to find out whether your room
> can extract around 40*400W, about 5 tons of cooling.  and supply that 16
> kw, of course.  I haven't measured many dual-quads yet - the dissipation
> might be closer to 300W.)
> afaik, their efficiency is maybe 10% better than more routine hardware.
> doesn't really change the big picture.  and high-eff PSU's are available
> in pretty much any form-factor.  choosing lower-power processors (and
> perhaps
> avoiding fbdimms) will probably save more power than perseverating too much
> on the PSU...
>

I checked specs for Supermicro SuperServer 6015TW-INF, it looks very
attractive - built-in IB interface. I can see the only objection if two MBs
in one 1-U create an additional heat stress inside the unit. If it is not
the case, then everything else is irrelevant, because I took care of the
good air conditioning and power supply for my new cluster. It also looks
like the twins give some money saving.
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