Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> writes: > The specific requirement we're solving is a workload which is highly > parallelizable. We're currently paying Amazon EC2, but finding it's not > very economical. So we're exploring alternatives, hoping to find a way to > run these parallelized jobs more economically. It is also ideal to keep the > workload in-house, so we can eliminate the security concern about Amazon > employees having access to our data and so forth.
You jumped from "ec2 is more money than i want to pay" to "let's use a bunch of tiny computers rather than fewer larger ones." I think this is probably the wrong choice. the thing is, ec2 is expensive because they don't have serious price compitition. The same is true of seamicro. If you buy standard servers, you can have compitition... if you want. Me, I buy parts and assemble, which gives me a discount, but, uh, if you assume that the hp, dell, and the rackable products are all about the same (assuming they have the same cpu/ram/disk) and you get competitive bids, you can do fairly well that way, too. a fully loaded seamicro rack is abt. $140K, right? before disk? for 1024GiB ram and 512 CPUs. with my current setup, I end up paying about $1900 for 32GiB ram and 8 (/much/ more powerful) CPUs before disk. So, I'd need 32 of those puppies, at a much more reasonable $60,800 - it would give me half as many CPUs, but, uh, from my experience a atom core is less than half a opteron core. And my price includes ECC ram, something the seamicro doesn't support, which makes a whole lot of problems largely go away. how much power would that eat? in my setup, we'd be talking about 3840 watts, each one of those single socket 8 core boxes eats about one amp of 120v, give or take. they say 4w per server, so that'd be 2048 watts for their solution; so yeah, it will take quite a while to make up the price difference. My point is just that with the current market realities, buying an 8 core/16 core opteron box with 32 or 64GiB ram is going to give you more performance at a lower price point than any number of atom servers. If you do care about cost per core, or cores per watt, look at the new amd stuff. the socket G34 stuff is really cheap and works well. I pay $300 for 8 2.0Ghz cores in a single socket. The new opteron 4100 series stuff has just come out, so I don't have any direct experience, but it looks like it might be even cheaper (and lower power) per core. _______________________________________________ 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/
