Clusters?

[nickth]

here are some Linux Amd Clusters

AMD Clusters
Or fancy having one of these AMD Clusters here

[BC]

I have a question: Do you want a true multi-processor SMP or an ASMP configuration. I'm asking because with SETI and a lot of DC projects going to BOINC... they sniff out / detect farms. There is discussion about preventing farms from being allowed. (I was in boinc beta until recently).

There are configurations you can build (like SGI "numalink")... this is where multiple SMP machines are linked together (typically blocks of 4) to form a single machine. Only 1 has an ethernet port & AGP enabled / installed. These machines give a fairly low latency across the link, functioning still as one machine.. The next tier is to link multiple 'numalink' machines together. This is equivalent to building something like an Origin 3000 (which is a 'scaleable supercomputer'). You then 2nd tier these machines. In all configurations, it still looks like one computer... but has a buttload of processors.

If you permit me to refer back to the VERY old days of the VME bus and Motorola 68030 processors, We would put up to 16 processor boards in a rack on one backplane. Each board was linked to the other on the 'front side' to form a single machine for near SMP performance. We could then link multiple backplanes to make it as big as we wanted and had power for.

Given that the Athlon64 (Clawhammer) and Opteron (Sledgehammer) are basically the VME on a chip (first step of a multi-step process), taking the entire product line forward toward multi-core CPUs , soon to be followed by SMP multi-core machines, and then these will be linkable at the backplane/bus level that use 1024 bit wide memory busses, etc etc.


Am I catching what you want to build or have I missed the boat entirely or are you looking to build a 'node' that is heterogeneous and/or loosely coupled and essentially 'invisible' because it is behind a single IP address and the lead machine farms out the work to the other processors and handles all the reporting back to the project?

I do apologize, the hour is late here.