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

Look for other users of the S/W for advice

[peterjt]

Why not start with looking at what S/W you plan to run, and then see what advice is available from them (and from other users) as to what H/W they would recommend.

Re:Look for other users of the S/W for advice

[JamesTRexx]

Precisely this. Do not look at the hardware for hardware's sake, look at the needs to run the software as best as you can. Does it benefit from parallelism? Throw tons of Opteron cores at it. Does it benefit from speed? Get the fastest Intels. Can it do everything in RAM? Stuff the servers with it, etc. etc.. Also, if it is built to scale, start with one or two servers, then see what kind of load it causes and base the next nodes you add on that data. You might even want to consider starting off with a virtual environment for portability to other hardware or cloud providers.