[gmx-users] How to buy a new cluster?

[David van der Spoel]

On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 10:57 +0200, Kay Gottschalk wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I got ~15.000 Euro to buy a Cluster for Gromacs. Perhaps I can increase 
> it to 20.000 E, but that would be a stretch. What do you think would be 
> the best options? From the benchmark page it looks as if Athlon 64 is 
> the processor of choice. What other components would you recommend?
> Thanks for your help!
It depends on whether or not you want to do many short simulations or a
few big ones. In the first case single processor nodes will be fine,
otherwise you want more processors per box. Dual nodes probably offer
best price/performance, but I just ordered some Quad boxes for exactly
these very big and/or long simulations. 

You should also consider what OS you want to run, and get stuff that is
supported. We are using rocks (www.rocksclusters.org) which does not
have very good support for e.g. SATA disks.

-- 
David.
________________________________________________________________________
David van der Spoel, PhD, Assoc. Prof., Molecular Biophysics group,
Dept. of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University.
Husargatan 3, Box 596,          75124 Uppsala, Sweden
phone:  46 18 471 4205          fax: 46 18 511 755
spoel at xray.bmc.uu.se    spoel at gromacs.org   http://xray.bmc.uu.se/~spoel
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