[Clusterusers] Opinions....

[Thomas Helmuth]

For my needs, I think more cheap nodes is better than fewer awesome nodes.
Rack 2 has been great for most (or all?) of the things I've wanted to do
since it was put in. I rarely use the larger nodes at all, partly because
others can make better use of them and partly because I've had weird error
when I try to use them.

Of course, I'm mostly happy with the computing power we have now, so if
others want larger nodes, their voices should probably take priority.

-Tom


On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:41 AM, Wm. Josiah Erikson <
wjerikson at hampshire.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
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> Clusterusers at lists.hampshire.edu
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>
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