[BBLISA] 1U servers needed

[Arthur Gaer]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Dima wrote:

> Quite unexpectedly, I need to build a
> computational cluster. Something like Beouwulf.
> To do that I need to purchase (or perhaps lease)
> about 20 1U number crunchers. I think I need
> Opteron machines (not quite a common thing yet) or
> other high-end processors.

We've been extremely happy with both the performance and hardware quality 
of our Sun Opteron 1U, the V20z (they now also have a 4-way Opteron 3U, 
the V40z).

Sun is working very closely with AMD and seemingly becoming very 
aggressive with Opteron hardware and pricing, probably to gain market 
share while the field is still wide open.  For us, the Sun academic 
pricing was cheaper than any "white-box" builder, with a higher quality of 
hardware as well.

My guess would be that a company as large as EMC qualifies for equally 
aggressive discounting from Sun.

Plus, Sun's Opteron servers come standard with a three-year, 
next-business-day, on-site warranty service.

You can buy the Sun Opterons with supported SUSE or RedHat pre-installed 
at an addtional cost.  We didn't bother, just installed a downloaded Linux 
distro with no problems--and got significantly better benchmark 
performance than the same model machine running Solaris x86.

Finally, Sun does sell pre-configured rack clusters of these machines 
which can save you some effort, though likely it costs significantly more. 
May need to buy in increments of completely populated racks, though.

Don't dismiss Sun due to their currently overpriced and not terribly fast 
SPARC machines--they really seem to be moving heavily into Opterons with 
some very nice pricing (once you get a discount, ignore the list pricing 
no-one pays) and they have a lot of engineering brainpower and a large 
support operation behind their designs that most other companies simply 
can't afford.

Arthur Gaer
gaer at math.harvard.edu

Senior Systems Manager, Department of Mathematics
Harvard University, 617-495-1610, FAX: 617-495-5132