Ski Kacoroski wrote: > Hi, > > I have been asked to recommend a small compute cluster for a small > software firm (they support the R statistics language) and am hoping > that some of the experts on these lists can help me with ideas and let > me know of pitfalls to avoid. The basic requirements are: > > 1. 5 nodes. Would like to be have option to expand number of nodes if > not too costly > > 2. each node needs 500GB local disk space, 4 cores, 2.5GHz or better, > 8GB ram. > > 3. need to have cluster be dual boot between windows HPC and linux RHEL5. > > 4. a controlling node that can be switched between linux and windows to > control the cluster. Perhaps run a hypervisor on this and have both > controllers running at the same time? > > 5. Possibly some shared space. They do not know yet if shared space is > useful for a compute cluster. > > 6. A switch to hook it all together. > > I appreciate your ideas on what to get, where to get it, what pitfalls I > need to look out for. > > cheers, > > ski > > Your specs are pretty basic. You could get almost ANYTHING to fill these needs. You don't mention whether the app is CPU or memory bound, or if it would benefit from more throughput or less latency. These little details can make a difference, but you probably don't know at this point.
You might want to get a loaner istanbul vs a loaner nehalem based system to compare. You can get a 2.5Ghz 6 core istanbul cheaply. Compare your app running on that vs the quad core nehalem. With the nehalem, if each job used a core and there were no cache conflicts (I think you'd probably be ok with normal stats math) you could get 8 simultaneous jobs on the nehalem and 12 on the istanbul system. The memory specs are different between them, so you'll have to look at that and how it factors in as well. The vendor isn't going to matter too much except in terms of price, your relationship with them, and any sort of management features that you might want. (The nehalem systems form supermicro come with integrated virtual KVM software over ethernet, so you can reset, cycle, view stats, etc. from everywhere, other vendors do this too) What kinds of switches do you have now? It is sometimes advantageous to stay with a vendor who you have a good relationship and discount structure with. HP is decent on the inexpensive but fully-featured side. You can do a lot of price comparison on the core speed vs cost to find your sweet spot in terms of throughput and compute per dollar once you know how fast it runs. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
