On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 16:25, Troy Dawson wrote:
> Ken Teh wrote:
> >
> Hi Ken,
> I'm a big fan of both Opteron as well as the AMD 64 (single cpu).  When doing
> recompiles on them, it just amazes me at how fast they are.
> I've also ran standard real life benchmarks on the dual opteron's versus the
> dual Xeon am64t (or whatever the name is).  Despite the opteron being a whole
> gigahurtz slower (2.2 GHz Opteron vs 3.2 GHz Xeon) the opteron beat the xeon
> in every test I ran.
> I have not done any formal heat load testing, but the hand test showed that
> the Opteron was at least as cool at the xeon.  Neither of them felt to overyly
> hot.
A large Opteron cluster does seem to make a lot of noise though.
I'm glad to get out of the amchine room at the end of the day!

> Vendors ... I needed good 24x7 support, and only the big names do that for us.
>   So I have only tested HP and Sun.  Both of which provided good machines.
For information, the Suns use the Newisys boards.
That is not me saying that finding a vendor which you are comfortable
with, and provides the level of support and reliability you want is not
important.


Another recommendation from the Beowulf list thread was to go for IPMI
cards also. (Sorry - the list archive seems to stop in August).