Advice on Cluster Hardware.

Ivan Pulleyn ivan at torpid.com
Tue Feb 5 12:53:35 PST 2002


Ooh, didn't realize this was out yet! This is a preferable board
compared to the Asus A7M266-D because it trades a useless C-Media
sound chip for an integrated 3COM 10/100.

The main quirk I noticed when playing w/the Asus board: NO USB (not
even 1.x) support. If, for some reason, you need it you are forced to
use a USB2.0 PCI card. The Tyan boards have good old-fashioned USB1.x
support on-board. This means you basically can't use USB console
switches with the Asus.

Ivan...


On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Alcino Dall Igna Junior wrote:

> You could stick with Tyan, if you prefer, using the TigerMPX
> (S2466N), that as the Asus, provide a fastether NIC on board
> and with the same 66MHz PCI, and the same optional nonECC
> nonbuffered DDR if with to 2 memory banks.
> 
> Alcino.
> 
> On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Ivan Pulleyn wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Rather than a Tyan TigerMP motherboard, consider the newly released
> > Asus A7M266-D. It's based on the AMD 760MPX which means you get a
> > 66Mhz (as opposed to 33Mhz) 64bit PCI bus. This could become important
> > if you switch to Myrinet or some other fast interconnect. In addition,
> > you'll have the option of regeristered or unregistered ECC
> > memory. While I recommend registered (and it's required for higher
> > capacities) it's nice to have a choice. Also, there's quite a number
> > of 760MPX boards coming out soon so you'll have more options as you
> > grow your cluster.
> > 
> > Ivan...
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Alberto Ramos wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > >   Here in a university of Madrid, we are designing a Beowulf for paralel
> > > computing in QCD. We will begin with a small cluster to see the performance
> > > and later try with other comunications, like mirynet.
> > > 
> > >   The Hardware will be 4 nodes each consisting of:
> > >   
> > >   - 2xAMD MP 1800+ CPU
> > >   - 1x512MB RAM DDR
> > >   - 1xTyan tiger MP
> > >   - 2x3-COM 905B NIC
> > >   - 20GB HD
> > >   
> > >   The master node has 1GB of RAM DDR, and one aditional HD to use as /home.
> > >   
> > >   The conection will be trought a HP Procurve Switch 408 with 8 ports to use
> > > Chanel Bonding.
> > > 
> > >   Now the questions:
> > >   
> > >   - Any known problems with the hardware?
> > >   - Are the NIC and the Switch good choices?
> > >   - Will the Intel FORTRAN 90 Compiler work with this hardware.
> > >   
> > >   Thank you very much for your time.
> > >   
> > >   Alberto.
> > >   
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> > 
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