Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best Use For a New Supercomputing Cluster?
Supp0rtLinux writes "In about 2 weeks time I will be receiving everything necessary to build the largest x86_64-based supercomputer on the east coast of the U.S. (at least until someone takes the title away from us). It's spec'ed to start with 1200 dual-socket six-core servers. We primarily do life-science/health/biology related tasks on our existing (fairly small) HPC. We intend to continue this usage, but to also open it up for new uses (energy comes to mind). Additionally, we'd like to lease access to recoup some of our costs. So, what's the best Linux distro for something of this size and scale? Any that include a chargeback option/module? Additionally, due to cost contracts, we have to choose either InfiniBand or 10Gb Ethernet for the backend: which would Slashdot readers go with if they had to choose? Either way, all nodes will have four 1Gbps Ethernet ports. Finally, all nodes include only a basic onboard GPU. We intend to put powerful GPUs into the PCI-e slot and open up the new HPC for GPU related crunching. Any suggestions on the most powerful Linux friendly PCI-e GPU available?"
No way in hell a project that big gets approved without a rationale.
And no way in hell the administrator of such a project would ask Slashdot what to do with it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Shouldn't you have figured out answers too all these (simple) questions before ordering several million $$$worth of hardware? Sheesh.. As for you specific questions: - IB vs. 10GbE: IB hands down. Much better latency and more mature RDMA software stacks (e.g. for MPI and Lustre). Cheaper and higher BW as well. - GPU: NVidia Fermi 2090 cards. CUDA is far ahead of everything else at the moment.
Wow, he just TROLLED THE CRAP out of slashdot. We mad, bros!