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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

Added by ChemIT:

E. Buy components for networking, power. And new rack.

STATUS, Option 1: Cost for A, C, and E: $46,500. Still need Storage and Backup costs.

Component

Option 1 (most likely)

Option 2

To consider, to do's, questions, notes and 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 4TB "WD black" for temp. user data (~$2,700+$250.

B. New storage machine

Synology-branded dedicated storage array.
$3,000, plus five 4TB hard drives ($250ea). Total price is for 12-16TB initial storage, depending on risk choices.
$4,250

Home-brewed dedicated storage array, perhaps running OpenNAS software.
To do: Get price of appropriate hardware.

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?
Note 1: Five 4TB HD's can allow for 1 drive to fail (16TB) or 2 drives to fail (12TB).
Note 2: Price for Option 1 includes five large 4TB "WD red?" for temp. user data (~$2,700+$250).

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). Add $2,500 per node compared to Option 2. Thus, $5,100 each node.
$40,800



16 nodes (in 4 Quads), with standard computational processors.
Each node: 2 * E5-26200v2; 2.1GHz, 6 cores/ proc (thus, 12 cores/ node). $2,600 per node.
$41,600

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
To do: Get actual annual cost, at current amounts and compression.

(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 (including compression and versioning), 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.

E. Components for networking, power. And new rack.

Under $2,700.

 

Specifics:
Networking (~$1,500)
    1 switch (Cisco SG300-52; ~$750)
    Network cabling (price dependent on above decisions. Expect well under $1K)
Power (~$700)
    UPS (APC SMC1500-2U; $500; for head node only)
    2-3 PDUs (power distribution units; a.k.a. power strips; $100 each)
        Exact qty depends on processor decisions (amperage calculations)
Rack (~$500)

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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