Note: Order must be $5,000 or larger to not pay "overhead". Therefore, buy parts, especially small ones, together. (And a single purchase is better than multiple, $5,000+ purchases.)
NOTE: Must finalize quantity (and final, final specs) after all other decisions are made and priced.
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 ?
Where should users' data be located?
Choice to provision users' data storage: | Pro | Con | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Within the head node | Sunk cost: Pay once and it lasts at least through warranty period, probably longer (no monthly costs) | May need to over-provision (pay extra up-front), speculating on future demands. Invest more now to reduce downtime due to future upgrade. |
|
SFS | Fee based: Get only what you need. | Fee based: Monthly costs. | Used pervasively in Chemistry research, with versioning turned on for all instances. |
NAS |
| Must confirm: Meets Matrix's performance needs? |
|
Dedicated, separate file server |
| Oliver not willing to have ChemIT set up and run? |
|
How should Matrix be backed up?
Answer is DEPENDENT on Decision 1.
The head node specifications is DEPENDENT on Decision 1 (and maybe Decision 2).