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Specifications, costs, and trade-offs for upgrading and expanding the Matrix cluster.
From Scheraga, with Czarek, from 5/27/2014.

The bottom line IN THE FOLOWING BRIEF FORM is

A. Buy new head node
B. Buy new storage machine
C. Buy new computational nodes
D. Arrange an efficient back-up plan

Component

Option 1

Option 2

Comments

A. New head node

Dedicated chassis
(1 U)
$3,000,

One of four (a Quad), in one chassis.
(2U)

Consider Option 2 for cost savings (if any).
To do: Calculate cost savings (if any, considering ).
Any other considerations, such as risk or recovery challenges?
Note 1: Head node has lower proc, lower memory, and 256 GB SSD drive for (OS and applications).
Note 2: Price for Option 1 includes a large drive 4T "WD black" for temp. user data (~$2,700+$250)

B. New storage machine

Synology-branded dedicated storage array.

Home-brewed dedicated storage array, perhaps running OpenNAS software.

Consider Option 2 for cost savings (if any).
BUT, must also consider risk, support, and staffing effort.
To do: What connector? If ethernet: iSCSI (all compute node writes through head node) or NFS (theoretically could be accessible by compute nodes)? If not ethernet, what connector technology, at what price and complexity?

C. New computational node

8 nodes (in 2 Quads), with higher computational processors.
Each node: 2 * E5-26700v2; 2.5GHz, 10 cores/ proc (thus, 20 cores/ node).

16 nodes (in 4 Quads), with standard computational processors.
Each node: 2 * E5-26200v2; 2.1GHz, 6 cores/ proc (thus, 12 cores/ node).

Consider Option 2 for increasing number of cores from 160 to 192, but with slower set of processors.  See Czarek's note, from 4/14, below.
For either choice, to do: Storage: Fast or large? Or both?
Note: Buying in multiples of 4 (Quads) is most cost-effective.

D. Arrange an efficient back-up plan

EZ-Backup

(At current quantities of backed-up data, ChemIT cannot recommend an alternative.)

On-going to do: Evaluate cost-effectiveness as volume grows. At current TB's of backup, costs are as were predicted (no surprises), and thus were at the time considered to be affordable and cost-effective compared to investing in own hardware and staffing.

4/14/14. Czarek: It looks like the slowest cpu E5-2620v2 2.1GHz has the best price performance ratio but anyway I would not buy the slowest cpu. Right now in Gdansk we are buying 10 servers and we decided to go for 10-core cpus E5-2670v2 2.5Ghz (20 cores per node). As in matrix in Gdansk we have only slow interconnect between nodes and some programs can run efficiently only on single node so more cores per node gives for such program advantage. Other programs both in Gdansk and on matrix just need the highest possible total performance and exchange very little data between nodes so than number of cores is not important. What about space restriction ? Is it better to buy smaller number of faster nodes?

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