AMD Athlon64 Systems -- dual-940 boards with AGP+PCI-X are still costly ...

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 01:37, seth vidal wrote:
> > But if you really wanted stability, you should have gone with a Tyan
> > Thunder product.
> 
> We evaluated them - getting the tyan thunders inside a rackmount case is
> nontrivial - and the additional cost for 'server features' really made
> little sense for a beowulf node.

I have a close associate who uses a large number of 1U, half-depth rack
systems that contain Tyan Thunder K7 dual-AthlonMP boards in a Beowulf
cluster. (I.e. he gets 4 CPU's per full depth 1U space.) His office has
had zero problems with them, and we are expecting a large shipment of
these units as well.

We ordered these systems with dual 2800+ CPU's, and the thermals on them
are simply superb. These systems were *extremely* competitively priced
and featured. We bought them from a company called HPC Systems, but I am
under the impression that their supplier is going to stop (or has
stopped) offering this particular configuration. I would be very
surprised if they didn't come up with a competitive configuration in the
Athlon64; they already have a similar setup for Opterons, IIRC.

-- 
Paul W. Frields <paul at frields.com>