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Los Alamos to Use AMD's Opteron in Linux Clusters
nuke-alwin writes "eWeek is reporting that Los Alamos National Laboratory announced it will use more than 3,300 Opteron chips in two of its Linux clusters. According to the article 'The key to Opteron, as it tries to gain traction not only against Intel Corp.'s 64-bit Itanium chip but also its 32-bit Xeon offerings, is its ability to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications equally well.'"
Who in their right mind implements an IIS farm, and spends $100K to boot, jeezus!
"Go price out an eight-way Dell 8450 server. Then tell me about low-end."
Go and price a nice sun fire, or a nice IBM regatta and get back to us kid. Yes those Dells are low end in the realm of servers....
One of the very serious problem related to building
Itanium clusters is their very high power
consumption and the associated heat removal problem.
It's okay for a few server in a room, but for
cluster trying to pack boxes is a key point of the
architecture. Apparently Opteron is not too bad
since there are dual Opteron in 1U server format
design commonly available, and it was overheating
that would be known by now, but for the Itanium(2)
cluster I know off, they never managed to get the
full cluster running without bringing either the
power supply down or the air conditionning down.
Itanium 1 was notoriously power hungry and
a common source of joke about this, Itanium 2 is
certainly better in this respect, but the clock
speed has been multiplied by nearly 3, I really
doubt they could compensate the initial problem
enough to get the new high speed chip to get back
to a decent consumption.
On the other hand Opteron seems quite better
probably getting the benefit of all the power
consumption research that AMD did during the 90's
where AMD chip were at the time consuming significantly more than Intel equivalents.
Now if someone has the time to make a search :-)
for the advertized power consumption of both chip
that would be a really interesting post
Daniel