Spec me a small cluster...

[Duff-Man]

I have between £5k and £10k to spend on a small cluster for use by our office, if we can get something worthwhile for that money.

I've got plenty of experience with speccing and building PCs, but I've not got any experience with parallel clusters. So, if anyone could point me towards the equipment I need then that would be great.

I was thinking of something based on the core2 architecture, rather than i7, in order to keep costs down. Also, the speed of the interconnects isn't so vital for the application we have in mind. About 8Gb memory per CPU would be ideal. We should have plenty of rackmount space free.

Any suggetions or good links would be appreciated

 

[Duff-Man]

What is the cluster for and how many machines were you thinking? e.g. are we talking about a resillient cluster where you only have two machines (running either in active/active or active/passive) or a cluster for rendering (for example)?

The cluster would be used for running large-scale scientific models. Numerical simulations of fluid flow and plastic / elastic deformation etc. A lot of the runs will just be in serial, so the cluster will be somewhere to dump runs that might take a couple of days, to avoid wasting performance on our desktop machines. We will also be running small parallel jobs (probably up to about 8 threads).

Big jobs will be sent to the main University cluster, but that thing is at about 50% downtime, so it can be frustrating (hence the reason we want to buy a small local cluster if possible). The University is happy to spend £2m on a new central machine, but they won't fork out £30k a year to hire someone to look after it. Typical big institution false economy.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any advice you can give

 

[Duff-Man]

Thanks Hades

I'll look into that lot and see what I can get.