[Discuss] I need a recommendation for a Linux-compatible high-end PC builder

[pw]

Well, as far as OpenMP + MPICH clusters go, I manage one used for 
parallel modelling at work.

It's a 2 server cluster with 48 cores in one node and 64 in the second.
Supermicro 2U, similar to the ones shown on this link:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/Xeon_Phi.cfm

University of Texas has a really big system called 'Stampede' based on 
these.

I recommend slurm and sview for monitoring and job management although,
to date, we haven't needed to partition for simultaneous jobs. So most
jobs are just run on the command line using  mpiexec in a shell script.

University of Texas is using slurm as far as I know.

The network was originally gigabit but to really make shared disk space
and network passing move infiniband is the way to go between nodes.

We just upgraded the interconnect between the two nodes
to 40GBe because the gigabit network actually made one model slow down.

Personally, I would have preferred 56GBe because the connection can then
run at the full PCI bus rate of the two nodes without having to bond any
connections. NFS doesn't do well if one of the links in a bond goes
down. But the 40Gbe was affordable. There are also 3 more PCIe slots in
each server, so virtual nodes could be used by partitioning the systems.
The infiniband switch we are using has 18 ports, so lots of room.

Anyway, long story short, wanting to run with large data
blocks over the network gigabit network wasn't fast enough for our
purposes.


P