On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Joshua Herman <zitterbeweg...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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/
I consider that approach last year (in late 2008). Then, without surprisingly expensive add-ons, blade systems appear like a bunch of separate machines with a (very) fast network. This is more work to manage for a sysadmin, and much more difficult to use for end users. It may be worth looking into this again. william > > 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 > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.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
