Re: Linux box: reasonable price

From: General Schvantzkoph (schvantzkoph_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/29/05 

Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:21:39 -0400

 
> OK---you're affirming my (admittedly much less-well informed) sentiments.
>
> Code isn't parallel; really not even multi-threaded (meaning, the intensive
> parts of code are definitely single-threaded). Maybe we don't need a
> cluster. I guess what I'm thinking is that many single-CPU systems (or
> perhaps dual) would be cheaper than a few systems with many (4+) CPUs. But
> that for economies of scale in usage, you wouldn't want users to have to
> figure out which host to log into to avoid processing bottlenecks. (And you
> wouldn't want to have users have a separate account on each host. Etc.)

The Athlon64-X2 are just showing up on the market. MonarchComputer told me
that they expect to start shipping X2 systems by the end of this week. The
sweet spot is the Athlon 64-X2 4400+ which is a dual core A64 with 1M of
cache per core (the cache size is really important, much more important
then clock speed so don't get a 4600+ which has a marginally faster clock
but a smaller cache or the 4800+ which has a marginally faster clock and
1M caches but cost nearly twice as much as a 4400+). I've been pricing a
new computer server, a 4400+ system with 4G of DDR 3200+ RAM a 250G
Seagate SATA drive, a DVD-RW and a mid-grade PCI-E graphics card comes in
at $1660. A two chip dual Opteron with 8G of RAM comes in around $4600.
Give that your code isn't parallel at the moment the A64 would be the
place to start. If you ever parallelize your code then you might want to
either go to an Opteron system or tie a bunch of A64s together with
InfiniBand.