From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jan 12 10:29: 5 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from sargon.photon.com (catacord.photon.com [216.141.160.136]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3EE9B37B402 for ; Fri, 12 Jan 2001 10:28:46 -0800 (PST) Received: from kenny (kenny [172.16.11.30]) by sargon.photon.com (8.11.2/8.11.2) with SMTP id f0CIT8205342 for ; Fri, 12 Jan 2001 10:29:08 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <007a01c07cc5$7f80e890$1e0b10ac@kenny> From: "Matt Wilbur" To: Subject: FreeBSD SMP benchmarks / processing cluster Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 10:28:45 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, We're costing out building a N node processing cluster (values of N starting between 20 and 30) and are planning to use FreeBSD as the OS for each node. One question we're dealing with is whether we're better off with N 1 CPU systems, N 2 CPU systems, or N/2 2 cpu systems.. I don't think SMP systems will give enough performance increase to warrant halving the number of nodes.. Can anyone point me towards *any* benchmarks of FreeBSD's SMP performance, be it FreeBSD vs. linux, FreeBSD SMP vs FreeBSD 1 CPU .. ? Something we've talked about is that if BSD/OS's SMP is far superior, it may be worth our money to go that direction.. but I'd rather avoid it if possible. We won't go the linux direction, even if their SMP is better. (long story....) The codes we've ported over so far (from Irix) are scientific applications we plan to run serially ... no PVM, no MPI, just scripts sending the jobs out and validating/collecting the results .... We have this all running on 4 1GHz athlons in standard cheese-o $950 desktop systems now.. If anyone's still reading, any recommendations on low cost rackmount systems? We've called BSDi and VAlinux, but are looking for more vendors. We checked out racksaver.com and ran away screaming after seeing one of their systems opened up... It seems like a lot of folks getting into the rackmount x86 business are building "server" grade systems.. all we need is ide/cdrom/floppy/cheesy video/intel or 3com nic ... If one node dies, we'll pop another in and keep going.. Thanks Matt Wilbur To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message