Greetings,
My name is Romulo Cholewa, and I´m currently working on designing an HPC
solution that will run LAM/MPI (early stage).
I have some understanding about the basics, but the last time I´ve
technically played with HPC was with MOSIX years ago. Now I´m working on the
pre-sales side, and couldn´t find any documentation about potential system
designs.
Fact is, we need to design a system capable of good performance, future
scalability and some cost in mind (but not that much). Time is also an
issue.
The main idea is to build the HPC with IBM BladeCenter. We want to start
with 6 nodes / blades, each one with 4 to 6 GB of RAM, 2 * Intel QC 2,66 GHz
(3550). This way we should prove the usefulness of the concept and attain a
wonderful density, if we need more nodes.
Starting questions
. Should we forget general redundancy in favor of connectivity / bandwidth ?
. Should we start with infiniband / myrinet and local disks, or blades with
2 * 1 Gbps Ethernet and remote storage (SAN), without local disks ?
Point in mind
If we choose local disks and we have to increase the number of nodes,
storage management may become harder. Booting all blades/nodes from a
central SAN storage might easy things up. We can´t technically have a blade
with an infiniband module and an HBA at the same time atm, but we can use
the infiniband for node communication and SAN access. Would it be the way to
go ?
I think these are rather newbie questions, so if anyone have any URLs
pointing to relevant info, it would be great.
Thanks in advance,
Romulo M. Cholewa
Info & PGP: [http://www.rmc.eti.br]
Disclaimers: [http://www.rmc.eti.br#email]
EMail/IM: [rmc at rmc.eti.br]
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