Hi - this seems like a good place to ask about people's opinions and experiences with regard to building a cluster of Linux boxes. The cluster will probably be used for some serial codes with a queueing system but mostly I think we'll want to run parallel jobs on it. Cost figures for an early attempt at such a system would need to be somewhere in the $50k range, plus-minus 3dB :-) I'm specifically looking for comment on the choice of CPU. Intel is perhaps simpler, but 32-bit and not as fast as the 64-bit Alpha. Anyone have real speed figures for clustered codes on both architectures? (People have reminded me that CPU speed is all for nought if interconnect bandwidth is under-specced of course.) Personally I'm inclined to favour Alpha, especially in view of the Compaq compilers being released for Linux (still in beta though). Any comments gratefully received. Oh yeah - the SMP-relevant bit of this message is that I expect to want to have each node of the cluster be an SMP box. Commodity purchasing probably limits us to 2 CPU's for either of Alpha or Intel I reckon. I tend to feel that since various codes will run on this cluster (some of which may use most of the memory bandwidth but certainly not all of them), we will gain by paying the extra money for a second CPU at the saving of chassis, disk, physical space etc. thanks, Neil PS: If people think an SMP-node cluster is a bad idea then I'll be rather off-topic for this list. Is there another list I should look at? Thanks. - Linux SMP list: FIRST see FAQ at http://www.irisa.fr/prive/dmentre/smp-howto/ To Unsubscribe: send "unsubscribe linux-smp" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
