custom cluster cabinets - cost of ownership...

ds10025 at hermes.cam.ac.uk ds10025 at hermes.cam.ac.uk
Fri May 25 01:18:24 PDT 2001


Are they any Universities or colleges both in the States & UK are prepare to
run courses in building low cost custom cluster cabinets?

Dan
--On 24 May 2001, 13:44 -0700 alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com wrote: 

> 
> hi  Josip...
> 
> yes.. cost of bulding and owernship includes at least
> an almost endless list of stuff to keey the system up...
> - costs of parts ( off the shelf )
> - costs of customized parts - paid to vendors
> - costs of internal designers - to specify what they want/getting
> - power it up and see how long to get it going smoothly/reliably
> - saving all work to another system in case the system loses
>   its mind and starts erasing data 
> 	( if you have a bad sdram ... it cn erase data on disks )
> - costs to admin the system instead of using the system for work
> - costs of the building and space and rack
> - costs of all the office admin and support staff...
> .. blah .. blah ..
> 
> - all the hardware costs becomes a miniml fraction of the entire
>   project costs
> 
> -- off the shelf... if number of servers is important and doing
>    some predefined tasks... Transmeta cursoe seems to be a very good
>    alternative as it supports 24 servers in 3U space..
> 
> have fun
> alvin
> http://www.Linux-1U.net
> 
> 
> On Thu, 24 May 2001, Josip Loncaric wrote:
> 
>> Bari Ari wrote:
>> > 
>> > We don't envision very dense clusters being priced above the cost of
off
>> > the shelf built clusters. The cost of building one enclosure is less
>> > than eight enclosures.
>> 
>> The cost of building an item is NOT the price charged for the item.  The
>> manufacturer's development cost must also be recovered.  Dense packaging
>> adds value not found in the mass market, so hardware vendors can price
>> them higher even if the unit production cost is actually lower.  Some of
>> the difference goes to their profit, but a lion's share covers their
>> development costs.
>> 
>> I remain skeptical about your pricing projections.  Until the mass
>> market for PCs drastically changes, I doubt that we'll see high
>> performance dense packages selling for the same price as equally capable
>> commodity alternatives.
>> 
>> Sincerely,
>> Josip
>> 
>> -- 
>> Dr. Josip Loncaric, Research Fellow               mailto:josip at icase.edu
>> ICASE, Mail Stop 132C           PGP key at http://www.icase.edu./~josip/
>> NASA Langley Research Center             mailto:j.loncaric at larc.nasa.gov
>> Hampton, VA 23681-2199, USA    Tel. +1 757 864-2192  Fax +1 757 864-6134
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf






More information about the Beowulf mailing list