Cluster v.s. very large workstation
 

Hi,

Some companies sell very large workstations which contain even more than 32 CPUs and 128 cores. So why do people still like to build complex and expensive cluster but not just using a large workstation in their office?

What are the advantage of clusters over workstation if they have same hardwares (CPUs, RAM...)?

For example, my department want to build a 32 CPUs (128 cores) and 128 GB ram computational power for CFD calculation. We shall choose cluster or large workstation?

Could you post a link to a workstation containing more than 4 CPUs?
I thought that 4 CPUs was the maximum on one Mainboard.

This thread provides several links to ebay.

http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/har...chine-buy.html

And this is from HP.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/in...ml?oid=4311905

I'm quite fresh to the hardware area. Correct me if they are not one mainboard. They are classified as server. But up to now, I haven't seen any problem if they are used for CFD computation from my reading online.

Those Ebay links are not for one computer. They are each a rackmount chassis that contains 4 individual computers. Working with these is no different than buying 4 computers separately.

And the HP machine is essentially a bunch of computers that present themselves to the user as one computer. It's a very old school approach. The market for something these has all but disappeared. Clustering via networking won out over shared memory a long time ago.