[Beowulf] Low cost Hi Density - Nehalem clusters

[Jon Forrest]

Ralph Mason wrote:
> We have been building a development cluster using consumer core i7 
> processors with 12gb of ram each and a ide cf boot disk on a motherboard 
> with embedded everything.  This is very cost effective as it uses 
> consumer processors and the cheapest ram (ram prices skyrocket once you 
> go higher than 2gb modules).  
> 
> Does anyone know of any commercial offering that can pack these nodes 
> into a high density rack or offer a similar price performance curve for 
> the given ram and processing power?  

I've recently used Finetec (www.finetec.com) to put together
a cluster based on the dual-motherboard Supermicro cases.
Since each motherboard can hold 2 processors, and each AMD
Istanbul processor has 6-cores, I can get 24 cores per rack
unit. That's pretty dense.

I believe that SuperMicro also makes similar motherboards
for Intel processors.

Check it out!

Cordially,
-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu