[Bioclusters] Direct connect infiniband/quadrics?

[Tim Cutts]

On 16 Mar 2005, at 3:46 pm, Rayson Ho wrote:

> --- Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Did you consider an 8-way SGI Altix 350?
>>
>> It might suit your application well, and might even fit in that
>> budget
>> (just).
>
> The IA64/Itanic is not good at integer code, and it is expensive and
> sucks lots of power. Opteron is much better and more common IMO.

I thought he said it was molecular dynamics code?  That would be 
floating point, wouldn't it?

And the power issue is only true up to a point; the good fellows at the 
Manchester Supercomputing Centre tell me that the large NUMA boxes from 
SGI that they have are *way* more power-efficient than their IBM Xeon 
cluster.  More expensive up front, yes, but the power consumption and 
aircon requirements are much friendlier.

Tim

-- 
Dr Tim Cutts
Informatics Systems Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
GPG: 1024D/E3134233 FE3D 6C73 BBD6 726A A3F5  860B 3CDD 3F56 E313 4233