Dear Tony:
An 8 way 700MHz Xeon 2MB server with 4GB memory, 400GB disk is $120K. A 1G Tbird with 256MB PC133, 40GB disk, and 4 10/100 NICs is about $1,300. 72 of them is $94K (and I think that for a 72 unit order you can get a discount of at least 20%). Add 12 24 port ethernet switches for $350 or $4,200. Plus 288 14 foot Cat 5+ cables at $3 each or $864.
Add a UPS for each adds another 8K and 2K for power strips and the like. This totals to $110K.
The cluster assuming 75% of disk is usable with a 3x redundancy gets you 720GB of usable disk, 4.5GB of usable memory (using 75% and 3x redundancy too). Of course there will be about 72 PCI slots free too. In all, a much more powerful computer for less money.
If used with no redundancy at all (say for number crunching or simulations), total specs would be about 2.8TB disk, 16GB memory, over 100 Gflops or 100 Gips, and about 2GB/sec usable memory bandwidth. The 8 way could maybe do 8 Gflops, 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth, and that is being generous to SMP.
Pete |
