[geeks] Massively parallel... cheap?

[Peter L. Wargo]

On Saturday, March 23, 2002, at 08:43 , David Passmore wrote:

> The real catch: this has to run in my basement, or in colo, so the Cray 
> on
> eBay is out of the question. ;) What can folks suggest in terms of a 
> system
> or cluster to run this kind of task on?

E10K is out.  Too much power.  Gee, you didn't mention cost...

If you didn't need all 64 procs, one of the new Sun SunFire Series (the 
6800 can take up to 192G of RAM and it is in one narrow rack - add a 
couple of loaded T3's, and you have mondo disk.)  It's only 24 procs, 
but they are US-III's.

Even the SunFire 4800 can take 96G of RAM.  Up to 12 procs.  Even 
smaller.

As for clusters, a bunch of 1U rack-mount systems might do it, but the 
power consumption and heat would be high, not to mention the 
complexity...

-Pete