Hi Mike, There are tons of groups on campus doing this so contact me off list if you want to discuss it. Fewer machines with more cores per machine is a bit more cost effective when it comes to the infrastructure to support it (power, cooling, space, network devices). Since the jobs aren't memory intensive, go for a many core system, but in case you want to use the cluster for something else in the future that may be memory intensive, you'll be a bit out of luck. Depending on which sort of processor/chipset you buy such as the AMD Opterons or the new Intel Core i7 processors (when they get ECC memory), it would not be as big of a hit. Shared disks are the standard and there are ways of differentiating nodes while still booting mostly from the same media. I would recommend looking into Rocks (http://www.rocksclusters.org) as it would get you going the quickest. For managing jobs there is Torque/Maui, or Sun Grid Engine which does a lot of work for you that Torque does and then some. Mike Miller wrote: > We are thinking about putting together a cluster of maybe 10 machines, > presumably using GNU/Linux. Do any of you have experience with this? > > Some of the things I'm wondering about include the appropriate > configuration of machines -- isn't it better in terms of cost/benefit to > buy fewer dual quad-core machines than more single CPU machines, > especially if the jobs are not very memory-instensive? > > We certainly want to use shared disks, but is there any problem with > booting all the computers from the same network drive? That seems like a > good idea to me rather than to have separate HDDs in the machines, but I'm > not sure how it is done. > > What free software is available for managing jobs, e.g., batch queuing? > > FYI ... The idea is to use these machines for our genetic analyses -- > maybe 600,000 SNPs on 7,500 people, but this mostly consists of running > one SNP at a time on some collection of traits. I don't think the memory > requirements are too great unless we try to load a lot of the data at > once. > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >