Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 14:17:40 01/31/05
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On January 31, 2005 at 16:47:10, Pavel Blokhine wrote: > > >How much can a machine like Hydra cost and does it have all of the 6 pieces >tables bases? A supercomputer with low latency interconnects is far more expensive than a cluster. A 64 processor SGI is about 1 million dollar. That's still cheap. A real SMP supercomputer used to be 16 processors and 10 million dollar a few years ago (16 processor Sun or 21264 around 2001). A 32 processor cluster (16 nodes, each node a dual) you can build easily for 100k euro. However the sheikh has a 64 processor cluster. Not 32 processor. So that makes price more than factor 2 more expensive. Hydra has cheap myrinet garbage, so the cluster itself will cost real cheap, though probably sheikh paid a bit much for it. You can build them very easily for 3000 euro a node. Highend myrinet cards are about 684.5 euro in the shops here a piece. Above my budget. However the 55Mhz fpga cards are not so cheap. that's the priciest part, as they are there in all kind of types and ranges and priceclasses. So add the 32 x expensive price for fpga card. you have models that do $500, but the type of cards chrilly uses is more like 5000 dollar a card. The expensive part in hydra is however the programming and the entire team they pay to keep hydra alive. Chrilly, 2 GM's, PR woman, and Muhammad Nasir ali. They all get a salary i guess. I don't know how much exactly and i don't want to publicly guess. But they are of course far more expensive to pay for many years, than any cluster is. >And is it possible to have customed made 16 way Xeon 3.80 Ghz and ask the >programmer of DF8 or 9 to make you as special edition that would support 16 >processors? It is possible to ask me to make a special diep version run on a 16 way cluster of diep. Note that xeon 3.8Ghz is very slow. In fact i would be happy to make a cluster version of diep. it's a small adaption as it's shared memory now and i would need to replace quite some calls to MPI. Only diep & hydra can work at clusters. 16 processor Xeon supercomputers are there but a bit out of your budget. At unisys they sell them (also 32 processor Xeons). Current diep executables would work at such unisys systems right away. In fact perhaps with some tricks you can get Crafty to work at such unisys system. But do you get your hands on a half a million dollar machine? So a cluster is far cheaper. I would personally go for a 8 node cluster with each node a dual opteron. I find 16 or even 32 nodes a tad big. Note i would go for a highend 8 node cluster. Not the cheapo myrinet garbage that hydra uses. It has too many disadvantages that myrinet, but well it's cheap. With special programming for it, the cluster i would build will perform like a 16 processor supercomputer, and within 1 year with dual core opterons even like 32 processors. Exactly like that. Try to play blitz with Hydra. Vincent
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