Greetings! I work for a company which has decided to attempt to replace its SGI Power Challenge with a Beowulf type Linux system. The primary reason behind this decision is the expense of SGI support and maintenance of non-commodity hardware. We have an eventual budget of 10 to 20 thousand dollars, with about 8 to 9 to work with at first. We have several years experience (all positive) with Linux; the most recent being with Debian Linux. We plan on using Debian for this project, and, if successful, would hope that we could use the project to advertise the strengths of Debian.
I would greatly appreciate any advice from the readers of this list on what hardware would be best for this project. Is the Alpha distribution ready for prime-time? What about SMP boards? We'd like to get the most bang for our buck, but don't have the manpower to handle extensive software debugging/instability. Also, if any knowledgeable reader could comment on any performance surprises which may be in store for us, that would be most helpful. The Beowulf systems I've seen described so far claim to peak at around 1.2 GFLOPS for 16 machines, which is about 2 to 3 times faster than to 400 MFLOPS we get with the Power Challenge, but I'm sure this is task dependent and I'd like to get a feel for how this performance will degrade as the granularity of the parallelism decreases. Thanks! -- Camm Maguire [EMAIL PROTECTED] ========================================================================== "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." -- Baha'u'llah -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
