On 05/17/2013 09:46 AM, Prentice Bisbal wrote: > On 05/17/2013 02:42 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> >> Yes, both for my personal computing (mostly, just a few old boxes on >> the Internet, less than kW total) and the dayjob I do that. I would >> gladly buy ARM cluster-in-a-rackmount, provided the price/performance >> is right, and assuming you could get these from the usual vendors. >> >> > How about the Boston Viridis? > > http://www.boston.co.uk/solutions/viridis/default.aspx
[commercial horn tooting] Penguin makes a 4U Supermicro chassis based ARM system. 24 bay chassis. We make a 2 and 4U 24, a 4U 48, and 4U 60 bay Scalable chassis based ARM system based upon There are a number of others as well. All based in one way or another upon the Calxeda reference design. We've got their booting integrated into our tiburon control bit (local disk booting for so many nodes is so 1990's :) ), and I believe Penguin has their booting integrated into their cloud software. [/commercial horn tooting] Observations on using them: ARM chips are not fast. They are great when you need *many* cpu cycles in a given volume, just don't expect these to be speed demons. They aren't. They make great web servers, wonderful mail servers ... everything the *aaS system folks need. With enough units running in parallel you can attack [buzzword warning] big data problems with abandon [/buzzword warning]. They are terrific for this. But they really aren't (in this incarnation anyway), HPC focused chips. That said, putting 192 cores in 48 compute nodes, along with 1/4 PB of storage in a 4U rack mount container is pretty darned awesome. And the CPUs will get faster and more efficient over time, so the HPC comment likely has an expiration date on it. Add to this, they run Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. Easy tool stack, most stuff just works. FP heavy and memory intensive code ... not so well. Integer heavy code, pretty well. -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics, Inc. email: land...@scalableinformatics.com web : http://scalableinformatics.com http://scalableinformatics.com/siflash phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121 fax : +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
