[Beowulf] noobs: what comes next?

[Geoff Jacobs]

Tomislav Maric wrote:
> Thank You for the detailed answer, it's really educational. I've been
> reading Atom's description today on tom's hardware, and there it's also
> described in the way You have described it.
> 
> I was thinking about using RAID because I was worried about backup space
> and speed for data transfer on the hard disk since there's a lot of data
> to be stored - about 1GB for a case with 175 000 finite volumes case.
> Now that I'm more informed I think I'll listen to You and Mr. John
> Hearns and go with standard issue CPUs and mboards and, besides that,
> whatever forgotten attic/basement hardware I can get my hands on from my
> friends.

Transfer speed gets a speed bump with 10k Velociraptors, but it's not
that huge a bump. You're better off buying cheap WD Caviar Greens and
spending the difference on RAM. Please note, RAID is not a backup
method, it's to increase the resiliency of the filesystem.

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs