Man i'm drooling over this thread already. What about some type of blade system like from IBM? http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Jan 22, 2010, at 2:49 PM, Tom Boothby wrote: > >> On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Simon King <simon.k...@nuigalway.ie> >> wrote: >>> >>> Would it be possible to have a faster disk system in *general* (i.e., >>> in the /home part)? >>> I don't know, I am no hardware expert, perhaps NFS==slow. >>> But that would be a nice thing to have. > > Of course our disk server had other major issues recently, so I don't know > if that's a good measure of how well NFS works. While we're dreaming, it > would be nice if all the machines had a /scratch, and if we're looking at > new ones maybe something better than a usb drive hanging out of the back > (perhaps even local raid). > >>> Actually, for some applications, sage.math isn't the fastest. >>> >> >> Excellent points! I'm definitely in favor of adding a few larger hard >> drives to the machines, because I really hate our current setup with >> USB drives cluttering up the rack. With regard to speed... there are >> faster processors out there, but this comes at the cost of cores. We >> could run 16 cores at 3.4GHz, which I could get behind. We could push >> this further, and cut down to 8 cores at 3.7GHz, but I don't think >> that's a worthwhile tradeoff. > > I like the idea of having a box with fewer but faster cores for the > not-as-parallelizeable tasks. 16/3.4GHz seems like a nice compromise. (What > is the speed of a new 24-core setup?) Of course well-used notebook servers > like sagenb.org are very parallelizeable. > >>> >>> By the way, I am -1 to having just two more identical machines. Why >>> not foster some diversity? >> >> Because the hardware is a *dream* to work with. The design is modular >> with captive screws, the rails snap into the rack and slide out >> smoothly, the ILOM makes it possible to hard boot / diagnose hardware >> from a remote location (we can flash the BIOS from anywhere in the >> world!) > > I really like being able to switch between machines and use the same > binaries, so that's a reason to reduce hardware diversity. > > - Robert > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
