[Beowulf] Re: Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers

[Cris Rhea]

 ----- "Prentice Bisbal" <prentice at ias.edu> wrote:
> Dell and others advertise systems that support up
> to 128 GB RAM, but I have yet to meet someone who
> can afford to put all 128 GB RAM in a single box.

They aren't *that* expensive these days... the key for these boxes is
that they have 4 CPU sockets-- this allows one to use lower-density 
DIMMS than trying to put 128GB on a dual socket board.

Without getting into discounts, a fairly decked-out Dell R905 
(4 x quad-core 2.7GHz Opteron, 128GB memory) is under $35K (USD)
(Assuming no Microsoft Licenses).

If you have large memory apps (and users who don't want to break them down
to run on cluster nodes), these are sweet machines for the money.

--- Cris

-- 
 Cristopher J. Rhea                     
 Mayo Clinic - Research Computing Facility
 200 First St SW, Rochester, MN 55905
 crhea at Mayo.EDU
 (507) 284-0587