[Beowulf] hardware question - which PSU for this?

[Vincent Diepeveen]

hi,

This seems ideal mainboard for beowulf clusters. built in infiniband  
it seems.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Arima-AMD-Opteron-Quad-Core-Socket-F-3000-series- 
Server_W0QQitemZ390149471460QQcmdZViewItemQQptZCOMP_EN_Networking_Compon 
ents?hash=item5ad6b87ce4

they get offered regurarly and cheap.

on ebay a while ago 10 of 'em got offered:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? 
ViewItem&item=360198390884&ssPageName=ADME:X:RTQ:US:1123

The problem is no manufacturer lists these boards and which PSU fits  
on it and what cpu's is unclear.
that's not a good way to build a cluster huh?

well suppose there is a psu that works, then that's ideal to build a  
cluster with. those barcelona cores do like $40 - $90
a piece on ebay now.

So most expensive part of the machine is the DDR2- ECC-reg ram. Some  
'cheap offers' on ebay regrettably are not ecc-reg
despite what the description.

For the coming time of course pricewise nothing beats 16 core AMD's.  
Those cpu's way faster than i had thought.

Intel is too expensive second hand simply and always will be, as they  
are very good in marketing their hardware as being fast,
despite that already for like half a decade they have no good 4  
socket platform getting sold (if we forget about Dunnington -
that thing is too expensive anyway still so let's forget about  
Dunnington).

intel and amd seem to have canned all type of new cpu's. i read now  
nehalem-ex is just 6 cores, no longer 8 and 2.26Ghz,
so that's not so interesting as IPC wise for well written software  
you can mathematical prove that AMD is nearly same speed.

If intel has that problem i suppose amd won't have a 12 core version  
of their chip any soon, besides those are like $2k a piece
the highend versions. Too much.

At least for my software the barcelona's are way faster than i had  
thought.
DDR3 is a lot faster latency of course than DDR2, but the total cpu  
speed is what counts in first place and the price
you can get it for.

Considering testreports of those 8 core cpu's i guess we won't see  
them soon. What was it 700mm^2?
They can't produce those in times like this i guess. Too expensive,  
no company wants to buy that.

So hence my quest for cheap alternatives :)

sorry for off-topic posting. guess though more of you are looking for  
cheap clusters.

Seems NASA has to size down also nowadays, so no more intel hardware  
for it in future either i bet.

Vincent