[Clusterusers] Opinions....

[Wm. Josiah Erikson]

In buying more nodes for the cluster this year, should I prioritize:

(1) More cheap nodes like we currently have in rack 2 (I could buy 
somewhere around 12 - 16 more of those nodes, or maybe 4 if I go with 
option 2 as well)
(2) Faster, more modern nodes with more RAM, but fewer of them (4 of 
them, to be precise)

I'm leaning towards (2), because:
     1. They will last longer
     2. We're almost out of space
     3. We don't have very many really fast, semi-modern Intel nodes.

I can buy 4 nodes that are kindof like dual-processor six-core (so 12 
cores total, shows up like 24 because they each have two execution 
units) versions of compute-1-17 with 48GB of RAM each for a total of 
$3100 used on eBay... or with 96GB of RAM each for $4600. Seems like a 
good plan (we don't ever need quite that much RAM though, do we?). Or I 
could buy a whole bunch more of what we've got in rack 2, though I'd 
have to get rid of a couple of the rack 1 nodes, and I couldn't put them 
on UPS, which is maybe OK, since the power problems seem to have been 
resolved.

Thoughts?

-- 
Wm. Josiah Erikson
Assistant Director of IT, Infrastructure Group
System Administrator, School of CS
Hampshire College
Amherst, MA 01002
(413) 559-6091