Zxian Posted May 13, 2007 Posted May 13, 2007 Yea... I'm starting to wonder how much that one system is setting you back. I'm starting to work on a 20-node computing cluster - two quad-core X5355's, and 8GB of RAM per node. Getting those to work together is going to be interesting... Any benchmarks on your setup?
bonestonne Posted May 13, 2007 Posted May 13, 2007 i know that you don't have to use both sockets at once, but the price is outrageous.i guess i stand corrected on single socket boards...just hope that if you need a PCI card its compatible with the 100mhz slots...
jcarle Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 i know that you don't have to use both sockets at once, but the price is outrageous.i guess i stand corrected on single socket boards...just hope that if you need a PCI card its compatible with the 100mhz slots...PCI-X and PCI are interoperable though not recommended. Most motherboards with PCI-X slots also include PCI slots.
Stoic Joker Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 I'm not sure what OS you're planning to use for this project, but be carefull getting a Supermicro board for a Vista box. While everything runs fine (stable,fast, etc.) RAID drivers are not available and I didn't get the impression from talking to them that they had any intension of releasing them for the X6 line of boards. The X7s supposedly will have Vista drivers (but I haven't seen them).The last Xeon box I did (now my DC) came from Next Internationall, good price, people, & service ... I'd buy from them again.The X6DAL-TG I'm running did fine through the Vista betas, and OK with the RTM (minus the 4 port Marvell RAID controller) ... But it is Mindblowingly fast as a Win2k3 x64 R2 server.Just thought I'd throw that in Stoic Joker
nmX.Memnoch Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 Yea... I'm starting to wonder how much that one system is setting you back. I'm starting to work on a 20-node computing cluster - two quad-core X5355's, and 8GB of RAM per node. Getting those to work together is going to be interesting... Any benchmarks on your setup? It set us back quite a bit...especially since the shared cluster storage is fiber channel. We got a really good deal on everything but the FC storage is what was soooo expensive. The system consists of two Dell PowerEdge 6850's (Quad Dual-Core Xeon 7120M / 20GB / 5x73GB 2.5" 10K RPM SAS Drives / 64-bit Server 2003 Enterprise) backed by a Dell|EMC CX3-20 4Gbit/s SAN containing 30x146GB 15K RPM 4Gb/s FC drives (the picture on the link shows the base system with one Direct Attached Enclosure (DAE)...our system has two DAE's).The only real benchmarks we have are the file copy tests that were done when the SAN was setup. We copied 3GB of data back onto the same drive set in under a minute!It's pretty nice the way I got it setup. Everything has redundancy built in...right down to dual switches for the fiber-channel connectivity.It's certainly going to be faster than the current SQL2000 cluster we have now. That system uses two Dell PowerEdge 6650's (Quad Xeon MP 1.5GHz / 16GB RAM / 32-bit Server 2003 Enterprise) and two Ultra160 PowerVault 221S drive enclosures for the shared storage.
Zxian Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 Just out of curiosity... what does the whole system do (unless that's "we'd-have-to-kill-you" information)? That's a crapload of crunching power and storage space....
jcarle Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 Sounds like webhosting or a large company's data storage.
nmX.Memnoch Posted May 14, 2007 Posted May 14, 2007 (unless that's "we'd-have-to-kill-you" information)Not exactly... It's strictly for database speed. Lots of data crunching. The original quote had 30x300GB FC drives but there was a downside. They were 10K RPM (vs. 15K RPM) and 2Gbit/s (vs. 4Gbit/s). Since we were more concerned with speed than space we changed them to the 146GB 15K RPM 4Gbit/s drives. The number of drives also played a factor there. A single database instance has at least two RAID10 drive sets; one for data and one for logs. One of the instances will have the data split across two drive sets and a 3rd drive set for the logs.We also opted to go with Server 2003 x64 to maximize RAM usage. The current servers have 16GB RAM, but they run 32-bit Server 2003 so RAM utilization isn't exactly optimal.
jcarle Posted May 15, 2007 Posted May 15, 2007 But nmX.Memnoch, you didn't answer Zxian's question? (To which I'm also curious to hear the answer.)What application serves the database server? Webhosting databases? Large company's application back-end? Point of sale data?
jcarle Posted May 15, 2007 Posted May 15, 2007 There's a reason I didn't answer. Well, without going into details... perhaps a glimpse of what it's used for could be cool.
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