[Beowulf] Re: Finally, a solution for the 64 core 4TB RAM market

[Gerry Creager]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>>> while I like the idea of these being available, I wonder where the
>>> real (big) market is.
>>
>> You mean other than commercial / HR databases that were built on
>> Sun's SMPs and now have a questionable upgrade path?
> 
> when I look at Sun's high-end boxes, I see either webservers
> (the many-thread stuff) or kind of sad old-fashioned sparc minis.
> the latter would probably lose out to a decent modern dual-socket
> box (dual nehalem like the HP DL760).  the question is how much volume 
> there is in the >= 8-socket market, and I don't mean "how many PHB's can 
> be persuaded they need one because they're important".
> 
>> Likely replacing current mid-range, <100-node clusters with a
>> single box.
> 
> unclear to me.  a current mid-range 100-node cluster is 800 cores,
> and I don't think we're talking about that in an SMP.  Intel's recent
> nehalem-ex preview was 128 hyperthreads (64 real).
> 
> I would guess that most people who currently have clusters would rather 
> get bigger/faster/cooler clusters, rather than go to SMP, unless for some
> reason they have a fixed problem size.  possible, I guess.

We intentionally built one cluster recently as a throughput system, with 
slow (ok, gigabit) interconnect, while the latest is "HPC" with DDR IB 
interconnect.

We have throughput users (most jobs run on a single node, and can take 
advantage of the node's memory footprint).  A number of these are SMP or 
SMP-lite.  Did I mention computational chemistry?

We also have some folk interested in map-reduce, but I've not been able 
to accommodate them just yet.

Depends on your mix of users.

gc
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
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