[plug] decent INTEL SMP boxes in Perth?

[David Griffiths]

John Summerfield wrote:

>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.
>

The plan is pretty close to the above, except that a couple of the machines
at least will be used as personal desktop machines during the day. Our jobs
are many
independent smallish ones with unvectorised code, so beowulf may be overkill,
but it may provide some useful workstation cluster management tools. 4 x
dual xeon cpu systems
is looking the best option at this stage.

cheers

Dave



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  David Griffiths                               griffith at environ.wa.gov.au

  Systems Manager
  Air Quality Management Branch
  Department of Environmental Protection            Phone:   61 8 9222 7151

  Westralia Square                                  Fax  :   61 8 9222 7099
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