>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Hayes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Richard> Dear list, I am think of building a prototype supercomputer Richard> and if it works I will build a much larger system. To do what? Do you need shared memory, or are you thinking Beowulf cluster? The key things are the scalability of the algorithms you want to run. This leads to trade off between a few high-power processors, or lots of slower processors. Also, how important is floating point performance? If you go for a cluster, then memory bandwidth and interconnect speed are the two big issues. If you're using MPI then drivers are available for infiniband and myrinet interconnects that run in user-space, and avoid the latency overhead of going through the Linux kernel. In general, the newer IA64 machines have much better memory bandwidth than commodity hardware. But it all depends on your application. Richard> What is the best way to get cluster for testing. I know that Richard> Stone Soupercomputer cost zero but really I have two Richard> questions. Richard> 1. How does the AMD64 stack up in cost / performance compared Richard> to the say 1.8 Duron? Don't know -- I use IA64... Richard> 2. How do you create SAN / NAS type storage for large data Richard> sets? You can buy then from SGI etc. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
