[plug] decent INTEL SMP boxes in Perth?

[John Summerfield]

> On Fri, Oct 22, 1999 at 04:30:02PM +0800, David Griffiths wrote:
> [...]
> > I discovered that the secondary cache size makes a HUGE difference in the
> > price of these critters
> > eg very rough pricing -
> > 
> > 	xeon 550 MHz 512k cache ~ $2,000 tax inc
> >         xeon 550 MHz 1M cache   ~ $5,000 (lots of variation here, due to
> > different kits?)
> >         xeon 500 MHz 2M cache   ~ $11,000 ex tax - ouch!
> [...]
> 
> Mind you, with the right application, the performance difference can be
> worth it. (perhaps a big database which has to run on Intel?)
> 
> Of course, by the time someone's buying a quad 2MB Xeon, anyone sane
> would recompile their application if they could, for a more scalable box,
> probably running on Alpha, MIPS or SPARC CPUs. Some of those can take
> vast amount of cache.
> 

Why not buy a few cases with cheap M/b, CPU RAM. Video cards, monitors, 
keyboards, disk drives optional extras. These boxes all boot from a server 
and nfs-mount their filesystems.

Oh, probably you'd want fast NICs and a good hub.

Possibly the cases could all have cheap dual processor boards and a couple 
of celeries.

One box only needs SVGA, monitor, HDD etc. Read the beowulf howto for 
more; it ships with RHL 6 and presumambly other distros.

You should get a nice little supercomputer for a song. And with four or 
eight boxes, you're a lot less bothered at the idea of one failing.

-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.