Though the highperormance server cluster is much cheaper than ever and has the best ratio of performance to price, it is still expensive than a cluster built with the regular PCs. If the customers like to use their exsiting PCs in the office or lab to build a PC cluster through the gigabit Ethernet or the public network, we can provide system design, GEMS software installation and result analysis.
It is worthwhile to mention that there are two big differences betwwen high performance server cluster and regular PC cluster:
(1) High performace servers use verified memory to ensure the system and data reliability under the long time simulation and complex envoironment.
(2) High performance servers has a wideband data bus, large cashe, fast memory. In addtion, high performance servers are easy to connect to the fast network, I/O device and storage device.
Cluster Based on Regular PCs
A practical Example:
Four regular PCs are two P4 3.4GHz and two P4 2.3GHz, respectively, and each PC is installed with 2 GB memory. The simulation time on the PC cluster is 206 seconds and the parallel performance is 79.85%. The same problem takes 658 seconds on the slowest PC and 504 seconds on the fastest PC.
Equipments provided by the cutomers:
(1) Regular PCs with proper amount of memory to fit the problem sizes they like to solve using GEMS cluster version.
(2) Windows operating system if you like to install with Windows system.
(3) Purchase a Gigabit Ethernet (we recommend)
Services and software we provide:
(1) Design the system with the certain PC type and number of PCs.
(2) Recommend the better fit gigabit Ethernet.
(3) Suggest better fit operating system (Linux or Windows).
(4) Provide free Linux operating system.
(5) Provide free cluster management software (for Linux system).
(6) Install and test the GEMS software in the built PC cluster system.
(7) Help create problem model, train the simulation procedure and data processing. |
