Kilian, I'm a noobie at the hardware issues but your machine at Sanford sounds like great bang/buck. Plainly economies of scale work both ways (I can't imagine wiring up that many nodes with ethernet). The factor of five thing sounds like a careless gloss of some numbers from some edition of the top500 lists, from some date, by INQ. Adams' site seems more modest. What I love about it is that it completely specs out what he did, very clearly. He gets an A for documentation, I'm not such a n00b at documentation :-) Peter
On 8/31/07, Kilian CAVALOTTI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Friday 31 August 2007 09:37:49 am Peter St. John wrote: > > I saw at wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_%28computing%29 > > that someone posted a link to > > http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/, a nice description > > of a "microwulf" at Calvin College. It has brief but useful > > descriptions of it's design, cost broken down by parts in the > > Manifest, and price/performance specs. > > If LLNL is an Epic maybe this is only a limmerick, but it's a witty > > limmerick. > > It's also been posted on the INQ: > http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=42050 > > It's very interesting from the design point of view, but I'm less > convinced by the price tag argument. > > Stanford University recently purchased a 276 dual-socket quad-core HPC > cluster, which is capable of 20.6TFlops (peak) and actually achieved > 15.5TFlops (it has been ranked #54 in the latest Top500 list). > > The cost per GFlops has been $109, which is indeed more expensive than > the microwulf's $94/GFlops, but still far from being "five times as > much", as claimed by the INQ article. Besides, the price included > software (a commercial scheduler) and support, management capabilities, > 50TB high-performance storage, an administration GigE network and a DDR > Infiniband interconnect. > > I guess it's easier to lower the cost per GFlop on large scale clusters, > but I'd just wanted to put this into perspective, and show that you > don't necessarily need to build your cluster from scratch to get > comparable price/performance ratios. > > Cheers, > -- > Kilian > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf >
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