[NTLUG:Discuss] Transport tool - opinions

[Terry Hancock]

On Monday 24 March 2003 12:17 pm, Kyle Davenport wrote:
>       I have accumulated a bunch of links in anticipation 
of my own beowolf
> cluster, but my threshold is <$200/node using the latest 
hardware.

How did you come to the conclusion of "<$200"?  I mean, why 
would you want, say, 4 x $200 instead of 1 x $800 (or since 
we know you mean a cluster, 16 x $200 instead of 4 x $800)?

This is not a rhetorical question.  I'm really uncertain 
how you make this decision, even in the rough.

I *think* that I would be better off with a massively 
parallel design (*lots* of less-powerful nodes rather than 
a few really fast ones), because the tasks that interest me 
-- ray tracing and finite-element-modelling -- are, I 
believe, highly parallelizable.  But I'm not aware of any 
"rule of thumb" that one might use to turn that into actual 
numbers for a cost analysis (I realize the only real test 
is to build two systems and compare them).

Of course, I'm not in the Beowulf-building club yet, but I 
do have a project in mind.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com