Ask Slashdot: Clusters On the Cheap?

First time accepted submitter serviscope_minor writes "A friend of mine has recently started a research group. As usual with these things, she is on a shoestring budget and has computational demands. The computational task is very parallel (but implementing it on GPUs is an open research problem and not the topic of research), and very CPU bound. Can slashdotters advise on a practical way of getting really high bang for buck? The budget is about £4000 (excluding VAT/sales tax), though it is likely that the system will be expanded later. The computers will probably end up running a boring Linux distro and Sun GridEngine to manage batch processing (with home directories shared over NFS)."

Comments

Re:Uhm AWS EC2 Cluster Compute

[jpedlow]

AWS EC2 was my response aswell. :)

for raw horsepower on the short - medium term, use AWS http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

ec2 should do well for this, imho :)

buy one Opteron 6100-based box

[Chalex]

You can get a SuperMicro reseller to sell you one workstation with 4 sockets of CPUs and a bunch of RAM. UK£ 4000 = 6 299.2 U.S. dollars

That buys you a box with 4 x Opteron 6134 (32 cores) and 128GB RAM (32 x 4GB sticks). And some hard disks.