Alternative hardware approach

[ds10025@cam.ac.uk]

Do you have a company in the UK?

Dan
At 15:13 28/06/99 -0700, Chris Worley wrote:
>Jerzy Kakol wrote:
>> Such
>> thing would allow to build relatively cheap clusters consisting of hundreds
>> of rack mounted nodes (no PC cases, they are also spare expense). Is there
>> something like that available on the market fairly below $100?
>> 
>
>Think of the cost benefit of commodity components.  Any mobo that
>requires a redesign, and will only sell to a limited market is going to
>cost a grundle (2x to 10x) more than its fully embellished commodity
>counterpart.
>
>We sell our "AltaClusters" W/ "ACE" control to take (cost) advantage of
>ATX motherboards and power supplies and full height PCI adapters, while
>minimizing space by fitting them into our custom cabinet (and also
>designed to compensate for the facts that ATX motherboards were not
>intended to fit in close quarters, and their power/reset controls and
>temperature monitoring become cumbersome past 1 node).  We refer to this
>configuration when a customer requires price-performance.
>
>For space-performance, we sell the "MCluster".  For example, one Alpha
>21164 only needs two slots in a 6U rack.  Even the passive backplane in
>this configuration isn't inexpensive (and you can't buy it at your local
>Fry's).
>
><Commercial time>
>See http://www.altatech.com
></end commercial>
>
>Chris
>
>