mike - building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image that i use for my purposes. you can simply dial up the number of processors that you purchase and use. you're charged by the hour for the the number of CPU instances you use. instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for that and simply use their resources on demand. On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Mike Miller<mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > We want to put together a few computers to make a little "farm" for doing > our statistical analyses. It would be good to have 50-100 cores. What is > the cheapest way to go? About 4GB RAM per core should be more than > enough. I'm thinking quad-core chips are going to be cheaper. How many > sockets per mobo? I guess 1-, 2- and 4-socket mobos are available. We > don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). We'll > use cloned HDDs in these boxes. My first thought is "blade" but maybe > blades are more expensive than somewhat less convenient ways of housing > the mobos. > > We have people here to house it and manage it and to pay for > electricity(!). They also will have ideas about what we should buy. > > Any ideas? > > Which CPU gives the most flops/dollar these days? > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- steve ulrich (sulrich at botwerks.*)