On Fri, 2004-04-09 at 15:23, Richard Hayes wrote: > Dear list, > > I am think of building a prototype supercomputer and if it works I will build > a much larger system.
Sounds like an interesting project. What do you want it to do? > What is the best way to get cluster for testing. I know that Stone > Soupercomputer cost zero but really I have two questions. > > 1. How does the AMD64 stack up in cost / performance compared to the say 1.8 > Duron? I'm not qualified at all in these kind of things but everything I've read suggests that the cheaper chips are a much better deal in terms of bang-for-buck. I don't know if that's a concern for a "supercomputer". Also, the Duron is a 32 bit chip is it not? If you're dealing with big numbers, the 64 bit chip would presumably perform better. Any particular reason you're looking at x86-esque hardware? > 2. How do you create SAN / NAS type storage for large data sets? What's large? At work we played with a device that ran 8 or so IDE drives as RAID and had a single SCSI interface on the back of it. It ran a PowerPC chip for it's internal RAIDing software IIRC. Given how cheap a 250GB IDE drive is these days, it sounded like a good deal to me. I don't know if it has a SATA counterpart, so if SATA does replace PATA you may not have an upgrade path for such a thing. You'll probably also want to get some pretty serious network hardware in there too. HTH, James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
