On Tuesday, September 17, 2002, at 10:41 AM, Romualdo Zayas Lagunas wrote: > > > On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Chris Dagdigian wrote: >> an bring a $300,000 NFS/NAS system >> to its knees. Storage does matter. >> >> Blast performance also depends on you tune your DRM (gridengine or LSF >> etc. etc.) and how you adjust your workflow with respect to splitting >> large databases, locally caching data on compute nodes etc. etc. > > I'm sorry, I didn't understand DRM, what does that mean??? > Sorry for the acronym. DRM == "Distributed Resource Management". This is a generic term that is used to describe software systems such as PBS, Condor, Sun GridEngine, Platform LSF etc. etc. DRM software is what allows you push work across a cluster or compute farm. At the most simple/basic level a DRM will give you the ability to bulk submit many jobs or tasks to the system which will then be executed and load-balanced across all the machines in your cluster or farm. >> What are you trying to benchmark for? Picking the right CPU? > > Yes we want to buy a cluster and we want the "right" CPU. > >> Some people on this list may have already done this. My personal > preference >> is Intel Pentium III's right now because: >> >> o P IV's are way too expensive >> o P III's are dirt cheap >> o There are a ton of dual-CPU motherboard options for the PIII >> allowing >> me flexible choices of system packaging and vendor >> o Athalon / AMDs are super fast but your motherboard choices are >> limited and you need to be really careful about cooling and >> ventilation > > But, PTM III is an "old" processor, it isn't???? > PTM IV, I agree with you... > Athlon....I don't know enough about that... > > Pentium IIIs are "old" if you listen to Intel :) They have a vested interest in moving people to the more expensive Pentium IV platform. While it is true that Intel will probably end-of-life them sometime soon they are still really good when it comes to price/performance ratios. Many of the large, production-grade and 'conservative' clusters and farms I've seen are built around PIII CPUs in the compute elements. They are rock solid stable and your choice of motherboards and products is still huge. I've never heard of a PIII cluster falling over because of heat or flaky hardware or mainboard reliability problems. Your particular needs or benchmark results may point you towards a Pentium IV or AMD chip though so do your own testing... -Chris