[plug] decent INTEL SMP boxes in Perth?

[John Summerfield]

> >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
> 


Even personal workstations don't need disk drives;-)

I've been thinking for some time that desktops don't need much more than a 
pentium, if there's a box with plenty of grunt on the same wire.

Beowulf is designed to be cheap; don't rule it out too quickly. You might 
find more grunt in more cheaper boxes (and more parallelism too for 
running more smaller CPU-bound jobs concurrently).

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