Comment You have to be kidding (Score 2, Insightful) 279
Never forget that the most important part of a Beowulf cluster is that it relies on no single hunk of metal in its operation. A cluster is intended to break gracefully. A good RAID-5 solution is the same way, you expect at some point to lose a disk; thus the reason that RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
Also don't forget that you've got 3 years warranty on those Maxtors, and you can just reload the OS on the bare drive from a copy of one of the other 280 someodd. Sure they suck, but are you really ever even using them? I bet they just got a special on a whole box of em and 80's were all there were.
RAM is exactly where these computers need in large, fast quantities. RDRAM, while arguably faster, is a money sucking wench, and 333 is just perfectly fine if you actually do your homework and buy the right chips. Sure, if you go and pick up the deal of the century at the lowest priced vendor online then you can expect to get some odd results. But if you are buying 300 gigs of the stuff you can get a pretty sweet deal out of a reputable manufacturer and get the nice chips to boot. And don't forget that those come with a warranty too; so you just send the dicey ones back....who cares if you lose a few boxes for a day or two?
It's the coolest because it puts off less heat than most, using the head-pipe feature off the cpus. Run a big HVAC and hook it up to those pipes, and all of a sudden you have A/C cooling directly on your chips, and its more quiet to boot.
This thing is built out of parts that are in *your* computer. It's built from the parts that are moving the fastest thru the vendors. Every single part of this cluster could be purchased in lot quantities at a very reduced cost due to slowdowns in the last 9 months.
Not including the network backbone, you can build the very computer they are using for much less than a grand per node and have it rate; I think that was the point and I think that they made it.
Also don't forget that you've got 3 years warranty on those Maxtors, and you can just reload the OS on the bare drive from a copy of one of the other 280 someodd. Sure they suck, but are you really ever even using them? I bet they just got a special on a whole box of em and 80's were all there were.
RAM is exactly where these computers need in large, fast quantities. RDRAM, while arguably faster, is a money sucking wench, and 333 is just perfectly fine if you actually do your homework and buy the right chips. Sure, if you go and pick up the deal of the century at the lowest priced vendor online then you can expect to get some odd results. But if you are buying 300 gigs of the stuff you can get a pretty sweet deal out of a reputable manufacturer and get the nice chips to boot. And don't forget that those come with a warranty too; so you just send the dicey ones back....who cares if you lose a few boxes for a day or two?
It's the coolest because it puts off less heat than most, using the head-pipe feature off the cpus. Run a big HVAC and hook it up to those pipes, and all of a sudden you have A/C cooling directly on your chips, and its more quiet to boot.
This thing is built out of parts that are in *your* computer. It's built from the parts that are moving the fastest thru the vendors. Every single part of this cluster could be purchased in lot quantities at a very reduced cost due to slowdowns in the last 9 months.
Not including the network backbone, you can build the very computer they are using for much less than a grand per node and have it rate; I think that was the point and I think that they made it.
