[Bioclusters] SGI Altix benchmarking whitepaper

[Tim Cutts]

On 7 Feb 2006, at 4:10 pm, J.W. Bizzaro wrote:

> Farul Mohd. Ghazali wrote:
>> I haven't looked recently but the Tyan VX50 based 16-core Opterons  
>> cost less
>> than that (maybe $50k?)
>
> 8 Way AMD Opteron™ 880 - Dual Core 2.4GHz CPU (940-E)
> £ 19,700.00 (about $34k US)
>
> http://www.armari.com/system.asp?SysID=336

That system does only have 4GB of RAM, which is a bit paltry compared  
to what the 16-way Altix will have, to be fair.  But nevertheless,  
that's a competitive box.  Once you configure 2GB of memory per core  
(which is our usual choice), a decent SCSI disk controller or a FC  
HBA, it becomes quite a bit more expensive at around £30k, but that's  
still a pretty good price.

Of course what it's missing compared to the Altix or the (much more  
pricey) HP servers is any form of lights-out management, as far as I  
can tell, which makes it pretty much a non-starter.  Some of the  
other servers they offer seem to, though (IPMI, anyway, if not remote  
console)

Tim

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