Todd Lipcon wrote:
Most people building new clusters at this point seem to be leaning towards dual quad core Nehalem with 4x1TB 7200RPM SATA and at least 8G RAM.
We went with a similar configuration for a recently purchased cluster but opted for qual quad core Opterons (Shanghai) rather than Nehalems and invested the difference in more memory per node (16GB). Nehalem seem to perform very well on some benchmarks but that performance comes at a premium. I guess it depends on your planned use of the cluster but in a lot of cases more memory may be better spent, especially if you plan on running things like HBase on the cluster also (which we do).
-stephen -- Stephen Mulcahy, DI2, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland http://di2.deri.ie http://webstar.deri.ie http://sindice.com
