A final round of quoting is underway now (about 8 months later) to settle on a vendor and configuration. Because of the time that's passed, all the chipsets have changed, so it's essentially a new round, rather than some type of clarification. Dell has offered a quote but it came in too high, and they agreed to offer a revision. Sun's quote is due today (12/1/06) and may come very close to the target price (roughly $190,000). We have received a quote from Lighthouse/IBM which basically was way too high.
More details when they become available …
| Vendor | Quote | Nodes/CPUs | OS | Storage | Infiniband | Software | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #A | $135,500 | 64*2 Xeon 3.0 Ghz 2 Gb | fedora | no | yes | ROCKS | 3yr | |
| #B | $146,500 | 48*2 AMD 1.8Ghz ? Gb | ? | no | ? | no | 3yr | |
| #C | $185,500 | 64*2 Xeon 3.0 Ghz ? Gb | redhat | 10 TB mass | yes | ROCKS | 3yr | |
| #D | $256,500 | 56*2 AMD 2.6 Ghz 2 Gb | suse | 1 TB high perf, no mass | yes | ClusterworX | 1yr | software package very good |
| #E | $265,000 | 64*2 Opteron 2.8 Ghz 2 Gb | redhat | 1 TB high perf + 10 TB mass | yes | 3yr | ? |
We seek to acquire a state of the art, mid-sized PC cluster system, configured for general purpose research and teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at Wesleyan. The various activities to be served by this system are detailed in the previous section. What is provided here is a general specification of such a cluster. The exact components of the final implementation may differ from this.
A system configuration that meets our basic needs can be specified as:
node: 1 number