Re: Hey Steve! Need some more Alpha knowledge

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

RAT said:
> > We are considering getting 3 or 4 of the Multia's to try Beowulf on.  I want
> > to try the Alpha platform specifically for Beowulf.  If it works well, I am
> > going to try to talk someone into buying a couple of racks of Compaq/DEC
> > Alphas for this reason.  Is there anything to prevent me from using these
> > cheapie Alphas to test this?

Well, you can test that the software *works*, but absolutely nothing
else.  The UDB/Multias are limited to 10 Mbit ethernet (unless you
want to try a cheap 10/100 PCMCIA card), their memory bandwidth sucks,
they have almost no cache, and they're pretty slow to start with.

If you want cheap Alphas for testing, look around for the 21164PC
models, which run at 533 MHz, and are only limited by a small L2
cache.  I've seen the motherboard + processor running for around $250.

Also, keep in mind that all the higher-end Beowulf clusters (i.e.
Avalon) are Alpha-based.  (The cluster that rendered Titanic was
Alphas too.)

> > How stable is Beowulf?

See last paragraph.

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Linux Users of Central Illinois
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Steven Pritchard          | http://www.luci.org/ for more info

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