Ask Slashdot: Best Bang-for-the-Buck HPC Solution?

An anonymous reader writes: We are looking into procuring a FEA/CFD machine for our small company. While I know workstations well, the multi-socket rack cluster solutions are foreign to me. On one end of the spectrum, there are companies like HP and Cray that offer impressive setups for millions of dollars (out of our league). On the other end, there are quad-socket mobos from Supermicro and Intel, for 8-18 core CPUs that cost thousands of dollars apiece.

Where do we go from here? Is it even reasonable to order $50k worth of components and put together our own high-performance, reasonably-priced blade cluster? Or is this folly, best left to experts? Who are these experts if we need them?

And what is the better choice here? 16-core Opterons at 2.6 GHz, 8-core Xeons at 3.4 GHz? Are power and thermals limiting factors here? (A full rack cupboard would consume something like 25 kW, it seems?) There seems to be precious little straightforward information about this on the net.

Comments

Why not rent the time?

[plopez]

You haven't said anything about your application. Do you run it continuously? Sporadically? Will the machine be sitting idle much of the time? Do you have the staff to support it? What about networking and storage? Do you have the ability to rapidly move and store data as the actual computing is only part of the story.
It may make sense to rent the time due to lower storage and maint. costs than to actually buy and maintain the infrastructure.