Ask Slashdot: Clusters On the Cheap?

First time accepted submitter serviscope_minor writes "A friend of mine has recently started a research group. As usual with these things, she is on a shoestring budget and has computational demands. The computational task is very parallel (but implementing it on GPUs is an open research problem and not the topic of research), and very CPU bound. Can slashdotters advise on a practical way of getting really high bang for buck? The budget is about £4000 (excluding VAT/sales tax), though it is likely that the system will be expanded later. The computers will probably end up running a boring Linux distro and Sun GridEngine to manage batch processing (with home directories shared over NFS)."

Use the Existing Grid

[Roger W Moore]

Why buy your own when you can use existing GRID infrastructure? For 4k you can't do much more that get a few decent desktops for yourself and a few grad students and/or postdocs. Rather than blow it on a massively underpowered cluster use the grid. I know the UK has massive clusters available to researchers so find out how to get an account and resources on them and use those. For test jobs, interactive analysis and other low latency tasks use your desktop.

Re:trade-off

[subreality]

Sometimes, never. Don't forget to add up power, cooling, sysadmin time... And that's before getting to intangibles like being able to spin up 400 cores for an hour and getting your result same-day instead of only owning 40 cores and having to wait until tomorrow.

Cloud computing really cleans up for batch computing jobs like this.