Dear all,

I have to buy a cluster for parallel calculation, I need some suggestions to define its configuration. I already have a cluster with 8 nodes, each of them have 2 AMD Opteron 2.8GHz processors and 4Gb RAM. The new cluster should have nearly the same computational power.

I have one more question: it is possible to reach the same performance in a cheaper way using standard PC in parallel configuration?

Thanks

Fusion

Cheapest option: Single socket desktop Intel kentsdfield quad core eg. Q6600 or single socket server Xeon X32XX. 4 Cores each.

More expensive option: Dual socket server Intel Clovertown quad core eg. E53XX. 8 Cores each.

You may need to use bonded dual gige to provide sufficient internode network bandwidth.

Hi,

There is extensive discussion of benchmarking on the CFX community webpage.

Joe - I have not seen anything to suggest high-end networking is required for small clusters. Obviously with multi-core CPUs this may change. Do you have any benchmarks here?

Glenn Horrocks