What would your preferred cruncher be?

[JeffCos]

If you had unlimited funds to build a cruncher what would you put in it? Can we be realistic about this? Something you wouldn't mind paying the electric bills on and that would fit in your residence.

Cos

 

[mrwizer]

I have already mentioned this before, but for me its all about the Opterons. I would like a couple of 2 or 4 way systems. I like the idea of the 55W ones for lower power consumption. But if we realy want to dream, I would not mind trying a RISC type, or Itanium2...

 

[Wolfsraider]

I would get 2 xeon naconas say 2.8's and a enthusiast mobo like maybe the NCCH-DL,
a gig of ram with tight timings for overclocking, maybe some swifttech heatsinks, a set of seagate x15 drives and a a set of raptors both in raid 0, an lsi card like the megaraid 1600, a case with good ventilation like the cooler master stacker, a nice video card like the x800 pro (for those non dc times), for sound maybe the audigy 2 zs, and for an optical drive the nec 3520a.Top it off with a 21 inch crt and a 5.1 speaker setup.I think an antec 550 watt psu would fit the bill nicely.

But then it might be over budget....How much are you wanting to spend?
(you said unlimited budget, but you also said realistic.. I would think this fits that nicely)
Mike

 

[Freewolf]

Hmmmm i think i have heard some of that somewhere before.

 

[GLeeM]

Hey Wolfsraider, what would that thing overclock to?

 

[JeffCos]

um, how much would all that cost?

 

[Wolfsraider]

Overclocking is not an exact science.I doubt you'd get over 300-400 mhz so max probable 3200 realistic maybe 3.0 ghz.

as far as cost

for the processors about 270 a piece so 540, the motherboard 230, ram maybe 250, the heatsinks i think are 65 apiece so 130ish, the drives say 100.00 each + 15 for the coolers, The raid card about 380, the case say 160, the video 375 or so,the audigy say 70, the dvd drive say 59, themonitor say 175, the speakers 70,the psu about 125,

total cost 2600 roughly shipped, of course you could buy the parts used and save about 900.00 if you shopped right.

I guess it all boils down to what you want and how much you wanted to spend?

Mike

 

[Amaroque]

I would get one of these. Drop 4x dual core A64's in there. They are supposed to debut at 2.4 GHz each core (4.8 GHz), so (2.4*2)*4=19.2 GHz of raw CPU power on one board. :Q RAID, SCSI, SLI Ect... will do nothing for any DC program.

You need raw CPU power, and lots of it.

 

[Shuxclams]

I could be happy running on these.... maybe a half dozen or so. Its actually very possible that towards Q4 I might just have these....











SHUX

 

[mrwizer]

Originally posted by: Amaroque
I would get one of these. Drop 4x dual core A64's in there. They are supposed to debut at 2.4 GHz each core (4.8 GHz), so (2.4*2)*4=19.2 GHz of raw CPU power on one board. :Q RAID, SCSI, SLI Ect... will do nothing for any DC program.

You need raw CPU power, and lots of it.

This is what I had in mind , although this is socket 940. Only Opteron's (800 series) will work in this. The good thing is that AMD is releasing dual cores for the Opteron first. I think second quarter? So it would be like an 8 way. And my piece for AMD, HyperTransport will enable a much higher performance level than Intel (no shared bus). Although Intel is coming out with a solution to this, it is not here yet.

JeffCos, are you serious about cost? I was not sure if we were dreaming or being realistic.

 

[Wolfsraider]

1,455.00 for the mobo

123.00x4 for 1.8ghz so 492.00

ram say 200.00
case 160.00
2 psu's 200

about the same cost.

 

[InlineFive]

A cluster of Athlon 64 3000+s with 256MB of DC-DDR network booting to Linux.

 

[Wolfsraider]

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
A cluster of Athlon 64 3000+s with 256MB of DC-DDR network booting to Linux.

How many is in a cluster?
Mike

 

[Amaroque]

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
A cluster of Athlon 64 3000+s with 256MB of DC-DDR network booting to Linux.

The OP said he wanted to build "a" cruncher. Not a whole farm. :roll:

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Amaroque

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
A cluster of Athlon 64 3000+s with 256MB of DC-DDR network booting to Linux.

The OP said he wanted to build "a" cruncher. Not a whole farm. :roll:

Can't a person dream in numbers?

 

[Wolfsraider]

Sure you can dream in numbers lol I was...4 instances of dc in one machine lol Drool

Mike

 

[Amaroque]

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
Can't a person dream in numbers?

Sure.

Actually, it would be fun to play around with a Beowulf setup on some older computers.

 

[GLeeM]

Hey Wolfsraider, aren't they getting those 2.8s up to 3.6 on air?

 

[Wolfsraider]

I hope so gleem then I might just have to quit dreaming and buy some

 

[Bok7575]

Originally posted by: Wolfsraider
I would get 2 xeon naconas say 2.8's and a enthusiast mobo like maybe the NCCH-DL,
a gig of ram with tight timings for overclocking, maybe some swifttech heatsinks, a set of seagate x15 drives and a a set of raptors both in raid 0, an lsi card like the megaraid 1600, a case with good ventilation like the cooler master stacker, a nice video card like the x800 pro (for those non dc times), for sound maybe the audigy 2 zs, and for an optical drive the nec 3520a.Top it off with a 21 inch crt and a 5.1 speaker setup.I think an antec 550 watt psu would fit the bill nicely.

But then it might be over budget....How much are you wanting to spend?
(you said unlimited budget, but you also said realistic.. I would think this fits that nicely)
Mike

Wolfsraider, no need to go this high, read this post... dual xeons

I've got one of these built already, running only at 2x3ghz, will go higher. Got all the parts for another one I'll build this week and also have another 8 xeon chips ready

Bok

 

[Wolfsraider]

Yeah I know but I am not the timnkering kind lol

Those are great and are great overclockers.

I unfortunately have two left thumbs when it comes to tinkering.

For the money those are great.

One note though they aren't 64bit capable.and they have half the cache.

but they would definately fly on an 800fsb

Mike

 

[MDE]

I'll take a quad dual core Opteron with either an AGP 8x or PCIe 16x (or two ) slot. Add 1GB RAM for each CPU and a 6800GT (or two), dual 20something inch LCDs, and a big RAID5 array and I'd be happy for a while.

 

[kamper]

If you're going bang-for-buck and multiple machines is allowed then some x86 based cluster with money spent on processor speed and cache, fast memory and fsb speed.

If you're going all out for a single cruncher then changing architectures is something to look at. Would a single rack of IBM's DeepBlue count as one machine

Or, aren't Itanium and Alpha processors supposed to be pretty hot seti crunchers? I'd also see about rigging up one or more of those Clearspeed boards. I think that's the name, it's that processor that does 64 concurrent threads at 200mhz.

 

[Bok7575]

Originally posted by: Wolfsraider
Yeah I know but I am not the timnkering kind lol

Those are great and are great overclockers.

I unfortunately have two left thumbs when it comes to tinkering.

For the money those are great.

One note though they aren't 64bit capable.and they have half the cache.

but they would definately fly on an 800fsb

Mike

True on the 64bit capability, I helped build a dual 3.6Ghz Nocona running 64bit Gentoo recently which flies. In fact it's the server now running the Distributed Hardware Evolution Project (DHEP). Cache is rarely an issue I've found.

For the record on the overclocked boards though, you don't even really have to do the board mod, just the u-wire mod which is trivial and reversible.....

Bok

 

[ssvegeta1010]

Any high overclocker that I can put on water/phase and not worry about heat.

(My laptop runs 56C-60C with a DC load). Worst of all, the HD edges on 50+C with virus scanning. Oh, next time I'll go for a Dothan-type CPU. (After my warranty runs out I want to overclock this in a freezing room)