Replying to self: our Citrusleaf database does amazing parallel operations on Sandy Bridge i5 (2400) machines. Single socket machines have the best interrupt processing and lowest memory latency. Going to Xeon architectures is, price performance, a HUGE decrease. There was a great post somewhere about $/speed in CPUs, and of course the true consumer grade stuff (i5 and Phenom II) were 10x better than "datacenter" grade machines. This is especially true for Supermicro. As much as I like them, you can save 4x money by going Asus and using a physically larger box - if you're not going into a data center. Another cost savings is running the project at home - you'll get more bandwidth for $50/month then you'll ever get from a data center.

Even though the application is parallel, your bottleneck can easily be the memory bus. Adding tesla cores won't solve memory bus issues. For a number of apps, Intel i5 quad cores stacked up increase memory bandwidth on the cheap. 10 500$ machines, or 5 1000$ machines with a cheap NVidia GPU, may very will outperform anything that can be put in a single "box" - because there is 10x or 5x more memory bandwidth. That means you need software to write not just parallel code, but multimachine parallel code - in which case you should get in bed with a computation fabric like Hadoop or one of a million others (raw OpenMP is another example, if you're a GPU hacker type).

Look, I get it about being overcommitted.

I don't get how you got into this in the first place. You sell handbuilt systems, but you provide free support for people who don't have your systems. As a friend, apparently, but these people aren't friends. I've got friends too - I fix their computers - and when I had deaths in the family, they put me up and took care of me, and didn't ask me to fix their computers.

The way to get yourself out of this situation is always to give them someone else to call. There's a million nice ways to do it. In this case maybe you say, I'll give you a hand when I have time, but this week's bad and next week doesn't look good either. If you want it done quick, a buddy of mine had a good experience with the help guys at X store, if you need it done quickly, give them a call - but let me know how it goes, eh?

Recently I had to duck out of a contract job after an introductory meeting because I didn't like the smell of the job. Sounded like too much work and not enough money, and not interesting. So I asked around and got two names of friends who were hungry (so I was doing them a favor) and contacted the contractee - they didn't like those guys, some of the best people I know (better, for this job, than me). So I said I'd keep asking around, but I'm not going to bother. They can't tell quality when they see it, which means they'll be a problem customer. I've kept a good odor, though, and if I do get hungry, I can come back to them.