One should definitely look into possibility of buying a BladCenter. The support for InfiniBand and Server RAID, many storage options and highly configurable interfaces make this system an outstanding hardware to work on. There is always an opportunity for hardware diversity also. That makes possible even experiments with hardware.
#Serge William Stein wrote: > On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Joshua Herman <zitterbeweg...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Man i'm drooling over this thread already. What about some type of >> blade system like from IBM? http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/ > > I consider that approach last year (in late 2008). Then, without > surprisingly expensive add-ons, blade systems appear like a bunch of > separate machines with a (very) fast network. This is more work to > manage for a sysadmin, and much more difficult to use for end users. > It may be worth looking into this again. > > william > >> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Robert Bradshaw >> <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: >>> On Jan 22, 2010, at 2:49 PM, Tom Boothby wrote: >>> >>>> On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Simon King <simon.k...@nuigalway.ie> >>>> wrote: >>>>> Would it be possible to have a faster disk system in *general* (i.e., >>>>> in the /home part)? >>>>> I don't know, I am no hardware expert, perhaps NFS==slow. >>>>> But that would be a nice thing to have. >>> Of course our disk server had other major issues recently, so I don't know >>> if that's a good measure of how well NFS works. While we're dreaming, it >>> would be nice if all the machines had a /scratch, and if we're looking at >>> new ones maybe something better than a usb drive hanging out of the back >>> (perhaps even local raid). >>> >>>>> Actually, for some applications, sage.math isn't the fastest. >>>>> >>>> Excellent points! I'm definitely in favor of adding a few larger hard >>>> drives to the machines, because I really hate our current setup with >>>> USB drives cluttering up the rack. With regard to speed... there are >>>> faster processors out there, but this comes at the cost of cores. We >>>> could run 16 cores at 3.4GHz, which I could get behind. We could push >>>> this further, and cut down to 8 cores at 3.7GHz, but I don't think >>>> that's a worthwhile tradeoff. >>> I like the idea of having a box with fewer but faster cores for the >>> not-as-parallelizeable tasks. 16/3.4GHz seems like a nice compromise. (What >>> is the speed of a new 24-core setup?) Of course well-used notebook servers >>> like sagenb.org are very parallelizeable. >>> >>>>> By the way, I am -1 to having just two more identical machines. Why >>>>> not foster some diversity? >>>> Because the hardware is a *dream* to work with. The design is modular >>>> with captive screws, the rails snap into the rack and slide out >>>> smoothly, the ILOM makes it possible to hard boot / diagnose hardware >>>> from a remote location (we can flash the BIOS from anywhere in the >>>> world!) >>> I really like being able to switch between machines and use the same >>> binaries, so that's a reason to reduce hardware diversity. >>> >>> - Robert >>> >>> -- >>> To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com >>> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to >>> sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com >>> For more options, visit this group at >>> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel >>> URL: http://www.sagemath.org >>> >> -- >> To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com >> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to >> sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel >> URL: http://www.sagemath.org >> > > > -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
