Seclecting specific board

[Lisandro Dalcin]

I'm not a hardware expert, but If your processors have FSB 1333MHz,
then you should select the matching NIC card, that is, the DX38BT one.

Additionally, you have to carefully select your switch. However, this
is not an easy task. If you have any chance of getting a switch from
your provider for a trial, then try to do some testing based on
MPI_Alltoall() routine. I believe many (almost all?) switches have
some performance drop in this scenario.

On 12/7/07, amjad ali <amjad11 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I want to bulid a beowulf cluster of 16+1 nodes with each node having one
> Intel Core2Duo (2.66 GHz, FSB 1333MHz, 4MB L2) processor and GiGE as the
> interconnect. On this cluster, I would run my PETSc based CFD/FEM codes
> (REQURING VERY FAST MEMORY/high memory bandwidth). Please help me out to
> select out any one of the following boards:
>
> 1) Intel Server board S3200SH, System Bus 1333MHz, supprting 240-pin DDR2
> 800 MHz RAM
> 2) Intel Desktop board DX38BT, System Bus 1333MHz, supprting 240-pin DDR3
> 1333 MHz RAM
>
> See that RAM speed difference. Given that keeping up running the cluster all
> the time and loging on of many user simultaneously is not the concern. The
> cluster may be dedicated to be used by one user whenever required. But it
> may be the case that running a code for several days will be required.
>
> Would the desktop board DX38BT be suitable to run the cluster for several
> hours/days?
> Which Board you recommend for this scenario?
>
> Regards,
> Amjad Ali.


-- 
Lisandro Dalcín
---------------
Centro Internacional de Métodos Computacionales en Ingeniería (CIMEC)
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