Hello,

I am about to start a project that will need at least 6 3Ghz processors. I do not have the confidence to build my own cluster so can people tell me where I can buy such a pc off the shelf - preferably all the processors in the one box.

Regards

Fujitsu-Siemens-Computers

www.hpcline.com

Your shipping charges and red tape with customs will be less if you buy within the country you work in. Since you have given no indication of this, I will give you a general procedure.

Go to the largest bookstore in your city. Find some magazines on Linux. In the USA, these would typically be "Linux Journal", "Linux Magazine", and "Linux World Magazine". Another useful magazine would be "Scientific Computing", available online at www.scimag.com, although this is typically not restricted to PC architecture. Look through the ads (buy the magazines to support their continued publication). Note down the websites of ones that match what you are looking for. Begin researching on the WWW. Do let us know the results of your research, and also your degree of satisfaction when you finally receive your system and begin computing on it. I am sure your information will be helpful to others on this forum.

In the USA, I have heard good things about Linux Networx (http://www.linuxnetworx.com) and about Microway (http://www.microway.com) from people who have purchased clusters, but I have not been involved in any such purchases myself. You should be looking for 1U to 3U height (per blade) of rackmount clusters, to get as compact a system as possible. Many of the same vendors can also build you a Microsoft Windows based cluster, if that is your preference.

I forgot to mention that of course you can go to the big players (HP, IBM, Dell). You should certainly use them and price and quality reference points, at the very least. On their websites, look for their "rackmount server" offerings. In fact, you could google the phrase and see what you come up with.

Check out http://www.pssclabs.com/

-- Jarmo

There are a few links to cluster vendors in the Resources/Hardware/Clusters/Cluster Vendors section here at CFD Online.

Hello,

I appreciate you all taking time to reply and I am currently looking into the various resources. I will post soon with some comparisons for others that may be interested and will update you on the cluster we go for.

Regards

Something you might want to consider is that for some programs, one box with six processors is slower than six boxes with one processor each. That is because some of the memory is used to handle the six processes. We use 10 2.6 Dell servers linked together with ethernet running LINUX and they only cost us about $2500 each (without rack). It is not a cluster in its true definition. I would recommend talking to your code's tech support people - ours gave us advice on configuration (not brands) and had us up and running within a day of getting everything assembled. TomK