Description of Quotes (Nov-Dec 2006)
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 …
Description of Quotes (from NSF Proposal 26 Jan 06)
| 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 | ? |
Description of Instrumentation Needs (from NSF Proposal)
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:
- 128 Intel Xeon 3.0GHz 2MB L2 cache 800MHz FSB CPU, or AMD Opteron 265 1.8 GHz 400 FSB s940 PGA 1024k (or other equivalent CPU)
- Dual Xeon server board or Tyan Dual Opteron xATX motherboard : 64 numbers 2GB installed memory DDR ECC registered RAM : 64 numbers
- 40 GB EIDE S/ATA Hard Disc drive for nodes: 64 numbers Hard disk Drive for the head
node: 1 number
- 64 bit linux operating system installed and configured
- MPICH, Hardware monitoring software, NQS/PBS/Maui Job Queuing software
- 1 48 port non-blocking Gigabit switch
- 1 24 port Infiniband switch, 12 Infiniband Host Channel Adapters
- Rack, cabinets, Interconnect cable, PDU
- Auxiliary Mass Storage of 10 Terabytes
