On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Jan Heichler <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm really surprised that everyone just screams "Nehalem" - of course the > platorm is the fastest that you can buy for money at the moment. It is the > youngest design so that is not suprising. > > But clustering is always about price/performance. And AMD doesn't look so > bad there.
Absolutely. The price/performance ratio is what I'm really interested in. We, with our 40 server order are not out to impress any benchmarks, neither are we going to saturate our eth backbones if we err in the direction of more nodes. Also, our hardware retirement cycles are pretty slow (I still have some 4 year old machines here) so I expect these nodes to keep crunching for a while ahead. In the past my experience is that users are usually happier with more, slightly slower nodes than fewer blazing fast nodes. I guess, that's because of the nature of our codes in that they are very easily paralliziable. Again to me the few most important parameters seem to be price/performance and general reliability. A CPU, memory or motherboard with "problems" (does that still happen these days or is CPU reliability a given?) is worse than a slightly slower but more reliable CPU. -- Rahul _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
